Here is an except of an interview i gave for Computer Music magazine
• Tell us about the history of Tone2, from its origins to today.Back in the 90s me and some friends we part of the 'demo-scene'. At the age of 13 I started programming Trackers for SoundBlaster-cards and DOS. There was not much software available on the market, and we were not able to afford real synthesizer hardware. That's why me and some friends programmed stuff in Pascal and Assembler in our free time. I also started to develop simple synthesizers. Since the computers in those days were too slow to generate something useful in real-time the output was rendered to a wav file and used as samples for a tracker.
At the end of the 90s i was part of the team which developed 'All Sound Tracker'. A sample-based sequencer tailor-mode for the EMU 8000 chip-set of the SoundBlaster AWE 32.
In the early 2000s i played with some friends in a band called 'Wellental'. It was somewhere in between of Ambient, Electronic and Jazz Music. We did play everything live and recorded some of our jam-sessions.
That's the point where i started programming my own vst-plugins. It was mainly for myself and my friends.
Myself and a friend also did work in a project called 'Druckwelle'. It was trance and dance-music.
Later i programmed the audio engine for several plugins released by refx: Vanguard, Junox, PlastiCZ and Slayer.
Tone2 was founded in 2004 to translate some of my ideas into action (FilterBank and the HCM synthesis). It was very difficult to survive in an overcrowded market.
Luckily Gladiator and Electra were a big success and many artists did buy our products.
• Tell us about your latest synth, Icarus 2. What sets it apart from high-end synths by other developers?Icarus2 one of the most versatile and mighty synthesizers ever. Icarus2 allows you to combine 54 different synthesis methods and provides a gigantic sonic range. The audio engine is not only able to create all classic synthesizer sounds. It can produce a vast range of fresh sounds, which are impossible with other products.
Icarus comes with the largest collection of filters available within a synthesizer. The audio-engine offers many powerful features like a drum-sequencer, a built-in vocoder, re-synthesis, a glitch-sequencer, the most advanced wavetable-editor available, an extremely mighty oscillator section, MSEGs, ...
The audio engine offers high-end sound quality and extreme flexibility with low demands on your CPU.
Icarus ships with an inspiring collection of 1600 production-ready sounds created by professional designers.
• How would you differentiate the various synths in the Tone2 catalogue? What are the main strengths of each?Icarus2: A huge synth with a very modern sound. It has a massive amount of features and is targeted towards professionals.
Electra2: A popular multi-layer workstation that is powerful, but easy to-use.
Gladiator3: The innovative HCM-synthesis offers a different approach to sound-design.
RayBlaster: Impulse-Modeling-Synthesis is a radically new and different approach to synthetic sound generation. It creates its distinctive sound by combining many short bursts of energy.
Nemesis: Can do classic FM as well as a new approach called 'NeoFM'. NeoFM is more powerful and more easy to program. It offers superior sound quality. A signature-sound is generated by its engine, which is capable of providing warm, silky and creamy tones.
Saurus2: It is an emulation of analog synthesizers.
• Your synths are often described as characteristically ‘edgy’ and ‘digital’. How would you respond to that?People often say that our synths sound a lot different than the rest. They sometimes describe it as a 'polished plastic-sound'.
I'd say it depends on what product you use and how you program the sound.
Gladiator, Nemesis and RayBlaster indeed do have a digital sound. But it's a harmonic and warm digital-sound.
Saurus is an analog emulation. It is limited to analog sounds only and not digital at all.
Electra and Icarus can do both - digital as well as analog. They come with big selection of analog-modeled filters.
There a free demo versions available on
www.tone2.com where people can try the synths for themselves.
• Tone2 is known for developing new and interesting digital synthesis styles. What’s your favourite synthesis method, and which was the most difficult to develop?My favourites are FM, wavetables, phase-distortion and additive. The most difficult one to develop was the impulse-modeling-synthesis of RayBlaster. Since it is a radically new approach it was not clear what features it needed, what sample-content works best with it and how sounds are designed. I had to do lots of experiments and measurements.
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