Spitfire Audio Phoenix is a new hybrid Synthesizer plugin made in collaboration with BT designed for cinematic sound design.
Brian Wayne Transeau—better known as BT—is an American music producer who has collaborated with various companies, including iZotope on the BreakTweaker drum synth, Unfiltered Audio on the Tails reverb, and Spitfire Audio on the Polaris and Phobos synths.
Following Phobos, the two have jointly developed another Synthesizer. Spitfire Audio released Phoenix today, a powerful new hybrid Synthesizer developed in collaboration with BT.
Spitfire Audio Phoenix
Phoenix is a new cinematic Synthesizer plugin for macOS and Windows. Spitfire Audio describes Phoenix as a deep hybrid synth because it combines an extensive sample library with synthesis.
It brings together unique sounds drawn from BT’s extensive music-making archive of vintage Synthesizer, sampler, cassette, and vinyl sounds, along with distinctive orchestral recordings from Spitfire’s premium libraries.
BT describes the approach behind Phoenix as ‘New Primitives’, a way of thinking about synthesis based on operations and architectures that go beyond conventional approaches and presets.
At its core is a powerful, all-stereo, multi-engine design. It has 16 voices, each with two independent synthesis chains, one per channel. This lets you shape the two sides of a sound independently, giving you deep sound mangling in parallel.
Hold one note and hear two independent instruments. Left and right run independent chains with different engines and settings.
Hybrid Synth Engine
Talking of engines: There are six distinct synthesis engines available: spectral wavetables, FM, sampler, 2OP FM transients, sub, and complex noise. All include a cross-modulating option.
A highlight of Phoenix is its two spectral wavetable oscillators and engine, which goes far beyond classic wavetable importing and mangling. Here, the engine generates the shapes itself with 80+ warp modes in two serial slots and thousands of ordered combinations.
Alongside the deep spectral warping, it also has a built-in modal resynthesis engine. Because the engine runs in two independent chains, you can achieve warps that differ on each side.
Another mighty engine is the 6-operator FM engine with 34 algorithms, and eight-voice unison that stacks up to 48 operators into a single note.
Sampler With Content From BT’s Archive
A key feature of the new Phoenix Synthesizer is its built-in sampler, which draws on a curated catalog of multi-samples from BT’s music-making archive.
This includes sounds from its vintage synths, samplers, cassette, and vinyl alongside distinctive orchestral recordings from Spitfire’s premium libraries, spanning strings, brass, woodwind, choirs, guitars, pianos, and tuned percussion
These engines can be combined and modulated across the instrument, giving composers extensive scope to transform source material and create sounds that evolve over time.
Flexible Modulation & FXs
Movement is central to Spitfire Audio’s Phoenix. It houses eight unique multi-segment Metasequencers, four random generators with 636 handmade rhythm patterns, and a probability arpeggiator derived from the rhythmic language of BT’s patented StutterEdit.
It enables all kinds of movements, ranging from slow, evolving motions to rapid bursts. A modulation matrix with no slot limit manges the modulators and gives you near-unlimited animation options.
Refine sounds with a multi-FX processor with 37 high-quality effects, from spectral smearing to shimmering granular reverbs, and from low-fidelity vinyl emulations to vast shimmer reverbs.
Each effect has its own design and set of parameters. Other features include:
- full MPE support
- 552 presets
- 40GB sound library
- …
Spitfire Audio Phoenix First Impression
Together with BT, they have created an exciting, powerful synthesizer—or rather, a hybrid instrument—that combines Spitfire Audio’s sampling expertise with BT’s love for colorful synthesis.
You’d have to take a closer look to see just how versatile the synthesis engine is. Based on the audio samples, it sounds very cinematic and evolving.
Spitfire Audio Phoenix is now available at an introductory price of £199/239€ instead of $249/299€. It runs as a VST3, AU, and AAX plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows. Phoenix will be available to demo at ADE, October 21-25th.
More information here: Spitfire Audio
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