Air Music Technology - Hype
An interesting and different approach to software synths
Hype by Air Music Technology is not your standard soft synth. In a good way.
Since I’ve played and reviewed lots of software and hardware synths, my first serious question is if it brings something new to the table. A new twist on the typical structure, or a new way to approach music-making. And that’s what we’re going to do with the Hype synthesizer today.
The first thing that you notice is the not-so-common design. It is very similar to the legendary RC-20’s UI which also inspired the Lifeline Expanse.
You have a few basic fundamental controls of your sound with some great visuals that you can tweak. These controls change for each of the engines Hype has available. The sound engines are FM, Wavetable, Virtual Analog, Sampled, and their combinations so the sound palette is quite vast to explore.
Below that, you can find your typical subtractive synth controls like LFO, Filter, envelopes for filter and amp, etc. To add to that Hype has a fully equipped effects engine with Mod, Distortion, Hype (which is an equalizer), Delay, Reverb, Compressor, Pumper (which is basically a Tremolo), and a Limiter.
So what’s special about Hype and why you should consider it?
The thing that makes this VST synthesizer stand out is its presets. Hype comes with over 1.500 presets organized in lots of folders depending on the type and feel of a sound so it’s easier for you to navigate. It is one of the few times that presets are actually amazing and most of them sound great with no changes at all. People at Air definitely spent a lot of time and effort designing all these preset sounds and I believe they did an amazing job.
Its workflow is what makes it interesting since it is a synth that encourages you to use presets and slightly tweak them. It is not a plugin that you will initialize and start building patches from the ground up and you’ll rely more on the pre-made sounds in it. The only weird thing is that I could not find a “favorite“ or “save“ icon to save my favorite presets in a separate folder. And since there are so many presets this would be extremely helpful.
Hype is not a sound designer’s synth. I believe that the producers that will love using it are those who don’t really like or are not that good at sound design and just wanna use some quality sounds instantly. And Hype does exactly that. Scrolling around the presets you can definitely find something that will fit your sound or will inspire you to write some melodies. So you actually buy an amazing library of tweakable sounds for your DAW. If that’s something you like, then Hype is definitely worth checking out.
