M-theory

Dualism included for free!

Overview

M-theory is a hybrid synth that is built around the Karplus-Strong delay based physical modeling technique, and uses samples, VA oscillators, and noise to drive the delay based oscillator, resulting in a very wide range of high quality synthetic and hybrid acoustic modeled sounds.

M-theory is the successor to the highly popular String Theory and, in comparison to its predecessor, M-theory is far more flexible and delivers a much higher quality tone, with greater depth, clarity, and character.

Feature-wise, it has many more tone shaping options, expanded filtering, more effects, programmable arps (clock gate), a dedicated bow/sustain mode, multiple dampening settings for emulating muted plucked/struck sounds, and more. One of the biggest feature changes is the option to use samples as exciters for the delay oscillators...but this is most definitely not a rompler.

How it works

The best way to think about the two part oscillator section in M-theory, and how samples can work in it, is to consider a guitar string. The string is under tension, but it needs outside intervention to get it vibrating. You can pluck it with your fingers, use a plastic or metal pick, you can bow it, hit it with a drum stick, etc. In each case, the resulting sound is still very much one of a string but it will differ depending on how you chose to make the string vibrate, and with what material.

In M-theory, the delays can be thought of as the guitar string, and the exciters can be thought of as what you used to make that guitar string vibrate. So just as how different objects/materials will produce different tones on a guitar string, using different sources as exciters in M-theory will lend some of their tone to the delays, but the overall sound still is the sound of the delays and not so much the exciters. In fact, when you use samples you'll find that remarkably little of the original sound will actually be retained, but they can have a very large effect on the tone of the synth.

M-theory provides three options for exciters: 24 built-in samples, user loaded samples, or virtual analog oscillators (including noise) and you can have two of them feeding the delays at once, each imparting a bit of its tone to the overall sound.