ReFill Review: Orkestrial Obersounds by Quixotic Sound Design

February 18, 2018March 1, 2018 Teflon Tomb Oberon, Quixotic, refill

I have always been someone who when I first trial a new Rack Extension would Init Patch and begin to mess about with the knobs, having zero interest in the quantity /quality of presets and quickly assess if the device brings something different to the table.

Oberon was one of those synths that was an insta-buy, as I could tell even before trying it that there were just so many parameters to tweak a sound. That said, I found myself (only doing my own sound design) creating harsh noise music that was extremely dissonant and I gradually moved away from using it. Then recently ReasonTalk user, Auryn from Quixotic Sound Design, familiar with an Oberon 2 review I did last year, let me take his new Oberon ReFill, Orkestrial Obersounds, for a test drive. This experience allowed me to see that not only can Oberon be musical, but it reminded me how much personality this synth has. Using the refill as a starting point, I was churning out colorful loops rapidly.

Further conversations with Auryn revealed that he has been working on this ReFill for over a year and in that time, has aquired a very unique perspective on Oberon:

“Oberon is a pretty unique synthesizer. At least, the idea behind it is unlike any synthesizer I’ve ever worked with, although like you, at first I didn’t know quite what to make of it, and it sat untouched in my rack for many months. Once I sat down with it in earnest, I quickly realized it was actually quite special. On the one hand it provides an arsenal of regular waveforms like a sawtooth, pwm and sine wave, and the ability to draw your own harmonic waveforms. But on the other hand the synth also comes with a small selection of bizarre, inharmonic wavetables that on first inspection seem only useful to make FX type sounds. However, Oberon allows you to dynamically morph between the “regular” waves and these strange wavetables, creating a whole new spectrum out of the 2 opposing oscillators. As a final stroke of genius, the synth features a “harmonize” parameter which allows you to “straighten out” the resulting sound (or a part of it) so that the end result will still be musical. This way of making sounds is (as far as I know) unique, and I found it really inspiring to work with.”

Quixotic Sound Design to sound design

Working with Oberon as much as he has, he certainly has some areas he focuses on and other features he never uses or uses very sparingly:

“The filters are a bit hit-and-miss for me, they’re very clean-sounding… a filter with a drive/saturate function (like Blamsoft’s Zero) or some other means of distorting the basic sound would have been nice. I do use them a lot for coloring purposes though (like slight notch filtering). I also never quite figured out how to get the most out of the unison, although sometimes I will use it sparingly. On the other hand I love the partial clip and bend controls, and have abused them plenty.”

I was telling him how much I enjoy Oberon’s ability to randomize the filters shapes, oscillator shapes, bend shapes and envelope shapes to quickly come up with unique sounds, but to my surprise he had a completely opposite approach with this ReFill. He described his process as ‘bottom-up directed’ i.e. always having something specific in mind, that he wants to make or explore, and working towards that. Many times he goes through what I always saw as the tedious task of actually drawing the oscillator shape, using the editor.

He usually just starts with a basic sine wave playing a melody, and from there builds on that. He explains the reasoning for this:

“I would argue that if you work bottom-up with a synth (e.g. start with a sine wave or another basic wave), you’ll get to know the synth more thoroughly since you’ll easily be able to hear what each operation does. But I do realize this doesn’t come without drawbacks… you do need time (and patience) to work like this, so for example it’s not a way of working that’s really suitable to composing actual music as you’ll want to be able to go quickly wherever inspiration takes you, before you lose the idea.”

This synth deserves dedicated ReFill libraries like this

While I have already discussed what I like about Oberon 2 in a video I made last year https://youtu.be/rq0ajtcsHvs , I want to briefly reiterate that the filters are fucking insane! They’re unapologetically digital and sound extraordinarily unique compared to most other Vsts and Re’s out there.

I love that while it does have some interesting filter presets, you can make your own filters, it has this extreme comb sounding ‘repeat’ feature, and you can randomize the filter shapes if you’re in a hurry like me! It’s also worth noting that that both filters actually have two filters built inside them, so you can mix between them.

The reason I singled out the filters was because I found while making some loops with the Quixotic ReFill, I was getting tons of juicy results by simply hooking up a slow tempo synced triangle LFO to the CV filter inputs on the back.

I will conclude by stating Auryn’s response to three questions I asked him

How do you determine when a patch is finished?

“The point I decide a patch is “finished” is really kind of arbitrary, as honestly it mostly boils down to “the mod matrix is full and I’m bored of listening to this sound for now”. There’s certainly no reason why adding further layers of modulation and processing won’t improve things!”

What are your top 10 favorite patches in this ReFill?

1) Frequency Creep (polysynths/orkestrial)
“This is the sound I start out with on the OOBEron demo track, it creates these bizarre semi-vocal washes all of it’s own accord when you hold it”

2) Fireplace (pads)
“It’s pretty cold this time of year here in Amsterdam :-)”

3) Cosmic Wiper (pads)
“The sound of the past being wiped away, sort of like in The Langoliers, but different”

4) Sonic Harverster (polysynths/orkestrial)
“A 400 foot holographic Pacman approaches. Do you A=attack/T=try to pet/R=run? >_”

5) Mirror Image (polysynths/orkestrial)
“Oooh, shiny! *checks hair* … you can adjust focus with the modwheel”

6) Ombre (polysynths/mellow&atmospheric)
“A nice warm IDM/EDM type sound”

7) Oberonic Manuscript (polysynths/abstract&misc)
“I honestly don’t even know what’s going on here”

8) Infernal Wind (FX)
“Some kind of lovecraftian nightmare whistle”

9) Nanobots (polysynths/abstract&misc)
“They just wanna talk, I swear…”

10) Nihilists (polysynths/EDM Keys)
“A cold, unforgiving sound that wil tyrannize over any sonic space it’s given. The modwheel adds vibrato but play with filter 1”

Why did you devote so much time to making patches for Oberon, instead of a Synthesizer that’s more popular?

“What I appreciate most about Oberon is that it’s a forward-looking syntheziser. There’s a lot of RE’s and VST’s on the market that look backward for inspiration. I certainly won’t say that the history of (hardware) synthesizers is something to be dismissive of, but I sometimes feel that nostalgia for the analogue past has become a ball & chain. Oberon is the perfect example of a synth that says “the past is dust in the wind (dude), let’s look to the future”. But in French. So that’s ehm… let me think back to high school… je voudrais acheter une carte postale!” Language barriers aside, that to me is what making electronic music is all about, finding new sounds and new ways of expressing ourselves sonically and musically. Finding new ways of communicating, really. I realize that I sound like a damn insufferable hippie, but I think in a small way it’s actually true. I’ll bet you my sandals…”

Here is a video where I embrace acting like a twit, hopefully not embarrassing the ReasonTalk brand too much as I play with/talk about this ReFill whilst having poor posture and yelling at callers: