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Many of us have been using synths with Rob Papen's influence for a long time. He has brought has tones of wicked sounds, and some great synth design. Rob was the man behind the Albino  and Blue, two incredible synths in both sound quality, usability and look and feel. Rob has now teamed up with contreteFX to bring us he's third monster fat synth, Predator. How does it fair up? Read on to find out.

Predator.Will.Hunt

VSTs.To.Extinction

 

Buy The Rob Papen Predator Virtual Synthesizer

Preying on sound

Aside from it's hard as nails looking interface when you first look at Predator it looks pretty much like most other synths; Three oscillators wired through a filter, a few LFO's and a bunch of effects. Don't let this simple design fool you though, Predator is not all looks and you will see this when you first start scrolling through the factory presets.

Each of the three oscillators come jammed with 128 waveforms each, ranging from saws and sines to god knows what additive wave forms. This gives us a huge array of possibilities, and you will notice that a lot of these waveforms are perfect examples of modern trends. The parameters you get for each oscillator rivals Native Instrument's Massive as far as flexibility goes. You can control the symmetry, free-running, sync, ring modulation and also a sub oscillator.

 

 

Stalking Interface

The interface for this synth is breathtaking. It looks tough and it feel real. There's very VST's out there that actually feel like you are using a real synth but Predator really does. The knobs and dials work like you would expect, and the layout is clean and uncluttered.

 

Buy The Rob Papen Predator Virtual Synthesizer

 

 

Blood Thirsty Filter

Let's face is, the interface LFO's and oscillators are nothing without a good filter and Predator does not let us down. Like Albino, Rob has put a lot of effort to give us more control then ever over the main filter. It offers us High Pass, Low Pass, Notch and Comb filters at 6db, 12db, 18db and 24db as well as a 4 stage envelope generator. On top of that you can add crunch or smooth effects before the filter and direct modwheel correlation simplifies the whole thing significantly.

There is also a second filter you can user for even more control, but this filter doesn't have as many sound shaping options as the main filter.

This filter can rip sounds to shreds, but at the same time is glistens in analogue warmth.

 

 

Bone Crunching Effects

FX are always the icing on the cake for most synths, and more times then not I seemed to be disappointed with most built in effects. However I was presently surprised with predators range. 21... that's right, 21 built in effects including ED, delays, Distortion, chorus and filters. They all sound fantastic, fresh and expensive.

 

 

 

Predator in Practice

So all with all the bells and whistles how does this synth play? The CPU usage wasn't as high as I had expected and the program is very stable.

 

In practice it is very different from a lot of other synths out there with only the one main filter. It felt a little strange for me to not have a modulation matrix to work with, but the LFO's are easy enough to assign values to.

 

Having a run though the factory presets of this sythesizer you can see that it's capable of making great sounds for a whole range of genres. Hardstyle, Drum and Bass and breaks producers will find that Predator can make plenty of those harder sounds to rival Pro 53. Electro heads will find this synth great for crunchy bass and cheaky synths too.

Overall

Sound quality is just incredible, interface is incredible, modulation is a breezy and covers too many types of sounds to mentions. This is one incedable VST, and for the price of  $179 this will be a welcome addition to your DAW's plug-ins.

 

I give Predator:

9/10

 

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Buy The Rob Papen Predator Virtual Synthesizer