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Alchemy is one of my “go to” instruments. I use it for everything: pop/rock (the bulk of it), film scoring, electronic... everything. In fact I *only* use Alchemy and FM8, with a little bit of Reaktor to fill in the cracks, for "synth" sources.
I started with the demo and fell in love with its sound character. Alchemy's additive engine is great, and in combination with the spectral engine, makes the re-synthesis phenomenal, but there are a few things that need to be capitalized on to take it to a really usable level. I have a Kawai K5000S, which is what attracted me to Alchemy in the first place. Two things the K5k have, and which Alchemy could really use, are: (1) velocity-switching per source--there was a "hard" and "soft" spectrum per additive source with selectable velocity switching curves. That's really useful for creating very expressive keys. (2) The K5k also shipped with Emagic's SoundDiver, which had a really useful GUI for getting into the additive engine. Each spectrum had 4 associated boxes representing the partial level's ADSR envelope. You could easily see and edit what each partial's time evolution was in relation to all partials' evolution at a single glance. Granted the ADSR GUI described wouldn't exactly work in Alchemy because you can have a user defined number of envelope break points, but this is the *kind* of visualization tool that might be helpful in getting the most out of the additive engine. There are also some very interesting handling tools in NI’s new Razor ensemble for Reaktor. A new visualization/interface paradigm is really needed to take these engines to the next level. That being said, Alchemy is still very fun to use in its current incarnation, even if the editor is kind of clunky.
Other than the additive/spectral engines, I’ve been quite surprised by the other sound generating capacities of Alchemy. I absolutely love the VA engine! While the GUI took some getting used to compared to other VA’, the sound is fantastic, and there are some really neat modulation possibilities that are unavailable on other synths—try using the “VA/additive” mode and stack multiple saw waves in the additive editor, with different phases/detuning, then manipulate the symmetry using any number of unique performance-based modulation sources. Very interesting… As a matter of fact I only use Alchemy and Reaktor for VA duties now. Alchemy is a joy to program in VA mode, once you understand the GUI.
Another surprise is the sampler/granular mode. Granular is very powerful, useful, and innovative. A breeze to use. However, sampler mode (and by association granular) disappoints me somewhat. Alchemy is marketed as "the ultimate sample manipulation tool." Part of manipulation is playing the right sample under pre-defined conditions. To this end, it would be extremely helpful if Alchemy included an audio editing tool as well. Also, a graphical sample mapper, even a simple 2D sample map (velocity and key range) is good enough for me just to make it easy to load up your own sample map. I want a graphic representation of the zone, not a difficult to use drop down list. Then I'd have no reason to use anything else! Perhaps my disappointment with sampler/granular engine has more to do with the sample sets that I’ve used in Alchemy. I’d like to see higher quality detailed sample libraries as mangle-fodder. Things like round robin, extreme velocity layers, multisampling, and even keyswitching/scripting would put this over the top for me [edit: I suppoze the sfz format supports much of this, but I don't see a lot of evidence of its use in the Alchemy preset libraries I have]. To show this capability, Alchemy needs more bread and butter presets. I have GPO (which I like a lot), but have been eyeing the ProjectSAM stuff. I'd love to have something along those lines for Alchemy. If Alchemy was truly the "ultimate sample manipulation synthesizer," I might also be able to pare down my straight sample libraries with their multitude of third-party sample players. For me, if Alchemy just had a basic sample editor and decent mapping GUI, it would also become my *sampler* of choice. How hard is it to make a "Kontakt killer?"
The manual is useful and the growing selection of video tutorials (free! Hear that Cakewalk?) are excellent and have helped me grow in the right places! Customer support is some of the best in the business. I love the Camel Audio team—they have always been prompt, polite, and helpful with respect to my questions and requests. You can’t go wrong with Alchemy!Read Review
I started with the demo and fell in love with its sound character. Alchemy's additive engine is great, and in combination with the spectral engine, makes the re-synthesis phenomenal, but there are a few things that need to be capitalized on to take it to a really usable level. I have a Kawai K5000S, which is what attracted me to Alchemy in the first place. Two things the K5k have, and which Alchemy could really use, are: (1) velocity-switching per source--there was a "hard" and "soft" spectrum per additive source with selectable velocity switching curves. That's really useful for creating very expressive keys. (2) The K5k also shipped with Emagic's SoundDiver, which had a really useful GUI for getting into the additive engine. Each spectrum had 4 associated boxes representing the partial level's ADSR envelope. You could easily see and edit what each partial's time evolution was in relation to all partials' evolution at a single glance. Granted the ADSR GUI described wouldn't exactly work in Alchemy because you can have a user defined number of envelope break points, but this is the *kind* of visualization tool that might be helpful in getting the most out of the additive engine. There are also some very interesting handling tools in NI’s new Razor ensemble for Reaktor. A new visualization/interface paradigm is really needed to take these engines to the next level. That being said, Alchemy is still very fun to use in its current incarnation, even if the editor is kind of clunky.
Other than the additive/spectral engines, I’ve been quite surprised by the other sound generating capacities of Alchemy. I absolutely love the VA engine! While the GUI took some getting used to compared to other VA’, the sound is fantastic, and there are some really neat modulation possibilities that are unavailable on other synths—try using the “VA/additive” mode and stack multiple saw waves in the additive editor, with different phases/detuning, then manipulate the symmetry using any number of unique performance-based modulation sources. Very interesting… As a matter of fact I only use Alchemy and Reaktor for VA duties now. Alchemy is a joy to program in VA mode, once you understand the GUI.
Another surprise is the sampler/granular mode. Granular is very powerful, useful, and innovative. A breeze to use. However, sampler mode (and by association granular) disappoints me somewhat. Alchemy is marketed as "the ultimate sample manipulation tool." Part of manipulation is playing the right sample under pre-defined conditions. To this end, it would be extremely helpful if Alchemy included an audio editing tool as well. Also, a graphical sample mapper, even a simple 2D sample map (velocity and key range) is good enough for me just to make it easy to load up your own sample map. I want a graphic representation of the zone, not a difficult to use drop down list. Then I'd have no reason to use anything else! Perhaps my disappointment with sampler/granular engine has more to do with the sample sets that I’ve used in Alchemy. I’d like to see higher quality detailed sample libraries as mangle-fodder. Things like round robin, extreme velocity layers, multisampling, and even keyswitching/scripting would put this over the top for me [edit: I suppoze the sfz format supports much of this, but I don't see a lot of evidence of its use in the Alchemy preset libraries I have]. To show this capability, Alchemy needs more bread and butter presets. I have GPO (which I like a lot), but have been eyeing the ProjectSAM stuff. I'd love to have something along those lines for Alchemy. If Alchemy was truly the "ultimate sample manipulation synthesizer," I might also be able to pare down my straight sample libraries with their multitude of third-party sample players. For me, if Alchemy just had a basic sample editor and decent mapping GUI, it would also become my *sampler* of choice. How hard is it to make a "Kontakt killer?"
The manual is useful and the growing selection of video tutorials (free! Hear that Cakewalk?) are excellent and have helped me grow in the right places! Customer support is some of the best in the business. I love the Camel Audio team—they have always been prompt, polite, and helpful with respect to my questions and requests. You can’t go wrong with Alchemy!Read Review
