Rob Papen Blade

The initial idea for the Blade virtual synth was born out of Rob Papen’s desire to have more ‘human input’ into the sound using the keyboard and controllers like the pitch bend or modulation wheel. An XY pad is perfect for the human input, but it only controls the filter and volume. This was too limiting for Rob Papen who wanted to also be able to control the ‘harmonics’ of the oscillator… changing the waveform using the XY pad. Hence, Blade was born…

At the heart of BLADE, ready to twist and transform your musical mind, lies the Harmolator. An additive synthesis system, which rather than using the system of changing additive partials, uses global controls which capture the essence of additive synth in an intuitive way making the creation of sounds much easier than using other additive synths. The nine Harmolator controls allow you to create a vast range of sounds so you get all the amazing sounds that additive synthesis can generate with the added simplicity of traditional subtractive synthesis.

The Harmolator allows oscillator spreading, fattening the sound and also square / sine wave sub-oscillator. What’s more, the sound can be modified further by the 21 per-voice distortions types and 14 filter types.