Dillon Bastan Natural Selection devices bring Sonic Charge Synplant 2-style DNA sound mutation concept to Ableton Max For Live.
“Wow,” moments have become relatively rare in the software world in recent years. Perhaps this is because many topics have been recycled for the umpteenth time: wavetable, granular…But Sonic Charge did provide such a sparkling moment with the release of Synplant 2 and its DNA mutation concept in 2023.
A technology of generating new sounds through an evolutionary process. Dillon Bastan is now bringing a similar inspired by Syntplant 2 concept to Ableton Live’s modular environment, Max For Live.
Dillon Bastan Natural Selection
Natural Selection is a new Max For Live bundle comprising two fascinating devices. Like Syntplant 2, a generic algorithmic treats parameter values of presets as genotypes or “DNA. This evolutionary process mixes them and generates new sounds by mutating them.
Dillon Bastan describes it as if your preset had a child or descendant. The fascinating is that you don’t need to touch synth parameters to create new patches. The process will do it for you and is fully customizable with the size of the seeds, seed values, mutation mode and amount, chaos, and more.
In this customization, you can also toggle whether a parameter is included or not or scale its value range. In a second tap of each of the two devices, you can see the family tree in detail and how it has evolved.
The Natural Selection bundle comes in two versions: P and S. The Natural Selection P is designed for Ableton Live and external devices, including plugins, and can mix and mutate presets.
Natural Selection S – The Synthesizer Device
Different in the second. Natural Selection S is a 16-voice Max For Live multi-synthesis Synthesizer device powered by the DNA mutation concept. The built-in synth uses a customizable partials system where each has a source voice, offering different synthesis types:
- morphing oscillator with FM
- resonator with mallet exciter
- Karplus Strong String with mallet exciter
- wavetable oscillator with custom wavetables and FM
- white oscillator
From here, it goes into a dual multimode filter with basic filter shapes, a ladder filter, and a vowel/formant filter. There is also built-in modulation. Each source has two destinations and bi-polar attenuation.
Two LFOs, two envelopes, two spray values, and various MIDI sources are available. Further, portamento, an internal limiter, and a multi-FX processor are also onboard. The latter includes distortion, chorus, phaser, delay, and reverb effects.
As a little bonus, it also ships with a rhythmic note generator with Euclidean and linear sequence generation. As it is part of the DNA engine, it allows you to morph and evolve rhythms and treat each “child” as an organism with its own “voice” and “song”.
And all this fascinating DNA tech of the P version with the mutation and generation is also built in here.
First Impression
At first glance, these are two very exciting Max For Live devices. I watched the two videos, and I think Dillon Bastan has recreated the Synplant 2’s DNA concept very nicely in Max For Live, with its own design style and feature set.
Dillon Bastan Natural Selection is available as a bundle for $40 or individually. The S version costs $30, and the P version costs $20. They run in Ableton Live 10 (with limitations) and Live 11 Suite or Standard with a Max For Live license.
More information here: Dillon Bastan
Great! Instanzen! Thank you, Dillon for your work, this is what we want to see!