£30 (iOS) £99 (PC/Mac)
Looking for absorbent synth bass sounds? Moog’s new software synth bass plumbs new trench-like depths, Roland Schmidt submerges…
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Whether you know it or not, it’s a pretty safe bet to assume that you’ll have heard a Moog synth playing a bass sound somewhere on a recording at some stage in your listening life.
From modulars to Sub Phatty, via the Minimoog and the legendary Taurus bass pedals, it’s clear Moog have synth-bass form.
Moog’s latest release stays in the software domain, while also encouraging us to stay in a bass register. Mariana is capable of providing that legendary Moog sound at a sensible price, but we’re intrigued to know how it differs from its previous softsynth outings.
20,000 leagues…
At first sight, the control panel is unmistakably Moog; the pots glisten, appearing three dimensional on a flat screen. It’s also uncluttered, which is largely because the synth’s panel is laid out across five pages. These pages break down sensibly, forming two synth layers.
We’ll begin with the layer called Synth 1; our sound starts with a dual oscillator, through five traditional subtractive waveforms. Once you select a waveform, this is shared across both elements of the dual oscillator, with independent tuning control for each. Oscillator 2 can be set at the same pitch, or one/two octaves above, but with hard tuning up to a perfect 5th above or below your triggered note, you can pretty much set the oscillator pitch wherever you want. The shared nature of the waveform might feel restricting, but the Duty Cycle control provides a form of pulse width modulation, across all chosen wave types.
It doesn’t end there though, because a further sub oscillator is also onboard, switchable in octave range only, but offering a sine, saw or square wave, along with a phase pot, to alleviate phase cancellation issues.
Unsurprisingly, the filters sound exceptionally good, with true Moog colour
Adding subtraction
All of these source components are blended at the Synth 1 layer level, using the mixer, which also provides a level pot for noise. This occurs before moving on to the incredibly comprehensive filter section, which is comprised of three independent sections; lowpass, high-pass and sub filter. All three have resonance and envelope modulation control, while the sub filter is switchable between high, low and band-pass modes. Unsurprisingly, the filters sound exceptionally good, with true Moog colour. The band-pass is a particular favourite, with its wispy quality, which is ideal for those classic reduced band-width bass parts.
Alongside the Synth 1 layer, the Control 1 Layer has plenty of modulation sources, which include three individual LFOs, each syncable and with a phase control, and three envelopes. Two of these ADSR envelopes are hooked directly to
