Yum Audio Ember: What is it?
Here at MusicRadar, we've lost count of the times we've heard the phrase "analogue warmth" used in relation to a piece of software that seeks to recreate the toasty, characterful sound of vintage synthesizers.
It's a term that's been bandied around so liberally by marketing and PR departments that it's become not just a cliché, but also something of a meme in the synth world. It sometimes seems as if almost every plugin passing through our inbox claims to have cracked the code for conjuring the ineffable vibe of analogue gear through digital means, so when we see the phrase attached to a new product, you'll forgive us for feeling a twinge of skepticism.
This was the case with Ember, a new synth plugin from Yum Audio that not only promises us a taste of that smoldering analogue warmth, but purports to be a "vibe machine" capable of producing "vibrant, living tones that breathe life into your tracks". Bold claims, these are. Do we need another synth plugin that mimics the sound of hardware, rather than doing something new and unique?
Ember ultimately excels at nailing the rich, wavering tones, gritty textures and saturated warmth that we associate with analogue synthesizers
This was the question on our lips when we spotted Ember in our inbox. I'm happy to say that the answer to that question is yes, if it sounds this good. Yum Audio's marketing speak may be grand, but it's justified. While its fundamental capabilities as a synth aren’t all that much to write home about, through some crafty processing applied after the fact, Ember ultimately excels at nailing the rich, wavering tones, gritty textures and saturated warmth that we associate with analogue synthesizers: this is its raison d'être.
Yum Audio has form in the lo-fi game, having previously released a raft of effects plugins on this exact theme, including the tape emulation plugin Flux Machine and Pitch Dropout, a tool that recreates the pitch instability of vintage gear. Ember is the brand’s first synthesizer, and is unsurprisingly kitted out with a number of effects that seemingly draw from Yum Audio’s existing stable of processors.
Yum Audio Ember: Performance and verdict
Ember is a three-oscillator synth, each equipped with a single waveform; we have a mixer for its sawtooth, triangle and square waves on its left-most panel, with adjustable pulse width for the latter. These are joined by a sub-oscillator, and two controls for a relatively basic form of frequency modulation.
Nothing groundbreaking here, but a nice touch is that the oscillator section incorporates an onboard saturation circuit, which helps to sum their blended sound together, adding additional harmonics to the output. Ember's filter is a relatively basic low-pass affair with controls for cutoff, resonance, and keytracking.
Moving further rightward on Ember's interface brings us to the Circuit section. This is where the magic happens. Unlike many analogue-inspired soft synths, Ember isn't built to emulate a specific instrument, or even based on oscillators designed from the ground up to sound like their analogue counterparts. Its analogue vibe is instead applied after the sound is generated through additional processing and modulation.
Here we can introduce four analogue-inspired characteristics to Ember's sound via the XY pad. Age dials in a degraded vintage character and an overall softening of the synth's tone, along with some wobbliness in the pitch, and Rust adds a noisy, lo-fi texture behind the sound. Instability introduces unpredictable variations to pitch, timing and other parameters, while Detune is a more conventional detuning effect.
These vary in how convincing they sound. Dialled up to 100%, they can sound too obvious and a little inauthentic, but we got some fantastic results by reigning in the effects to around 50% to 60%, imbuing our sounds with a pleasingly organic quality via the subtle sonic variations introduced by the effects. This panel is by far our favourite thing about Ember, and these four controls really can transform a sterile patch into something much more soulful and distinctive.
Crackle, Ripple and Heat, the distortion/saturation effect, are all especially useful for imbuing the plugin's analogue-style tones with additional lo-fi charm
In addition to its Circuit panel, Ember is equipped with a generous set of seven more effects controlled via the same XY pad, each with two adjustable parameters. These include chorus, compression, distortion, delay, and reverb, along with Ripple, a rhythmic volume jitter that mimics the sonic subtleties of cassette tape, and Crackle, which introduces four different types of crackle and noise. Crackle, Ripple and Heat, the distortion/saturation effect, are all especially useful for imbuing the plugin's analogue-style tones with additional lo-fi charm.
The delay has additional controls for rate and division, and the reverb can cycle through four different preset sizes, but on the whole, there’s not a huge amount of control on offer in the effects department. Though a case could be made for the XY pad’s simplicity and ease-of-use, with this many quality effects on offer, it’s a shame not to have the option of opening up a separate panel that provides further opportunity for experimentation.
As far as modulation options go, Ember isn't kitted out with a conventional LFO, but instead a Drift section that lets you apply four preset types of drift (Yum Audio’s name for a kind of semi-randomized modulation) to a choice of four modulation targets. These drift modes range from a slow and gradual movement to rapid, erratic flutter, and there's no way to tweak their rate or precisely adjust their waveform.
Though again, we'd have appreciated a little more control here, the Drift concept fits in nicely with Ember's overarching theme; it's more about mimicking the oscillator drift that’s characteristic of analogue synths than modulation in the conventional sense. Ember's two envelope generators can also be used to modulate a handful of its parameters, along with the typical amplitude and filter cutoff.
Ember has a Dice button in the top-left corner that will instantly randomize almost all of its parameters to handily create new and unpredictable presets
In the same panel as the Drift controls you'll find a multimode arpeggiator, with a choice of nine preset patterns and a probability control that decreases the likelihood of each step in the pattern sounding. Continuing on the theme of randomization, Ember has a Dice button in the top-left corner that will instantly randomize almost all of its parameters to handily create new and unpredictable presets, and there's a dial alongside it which controls the intensity of the randomization.
We arrived at some satisfying results here by dialling back the randomization amount to around 15% and introducing subtle changes to sounds that we already liked; it’s a neat way to quickly cycle through slight variations on patches you like. On the other hand, ramping it up to 100% and auditioning the resulting sounds was a fun exercise that generated some surprisingly wacky patches with tons of creative potential. (And a lot of duds.)
Finally, we come to Ember's Master section, which houses a mono/poly switch, volume and velocity sensitivity controls, alongside four macros, controlled via two more XY pads, that can be used to make sweeping changes to multiple parameters at once.
Spending some time with Ember while writing this review, we’ll admit that it became hard to pull ourselves away from the synth
Width pans the synth's voices across the stereo field to produce a wider and more enveloping sound, while Tone brightens and darkens the output by concurrently adjusting a number of relevant parameters. The Time control tweaks all of Ember’s time-based parameters at once, affecting the envelopes, reverb and delay time, and Intensity can be used to dial all parameters in the Circuit and FX panels up or down in unison, quickly blending between the processed and unprocessed versions of the oscillators’ output.
Spending some time with Ember while writing this review, we’ll admit that it became hard to pull ourselves away from the synth. Cycling through its ample selection of artfully designed presets while sending arpeggiated patterns into a looper, we found ourselves mesmerized by their repetition.
Part of the reason that analogue synthesis naturally appeals to our ears is the way that its minute variations and inconsistencies make every note sound ever so slightly different, making repetitions of the same phrase feel continuously engaging. This is exactly the quality that Ember manages to capture so well.
On one level, Ember is a fairly limited synth. Its oscillator section is relatively basic, the filter has only a single mode and there’s not even a proper LFO to play with. What Ember does have, though, is a fantastic sound that successfully captures the beautifully imperfect character of analogue synthesis, thanks largely to its excellent Circuit and Drift sections.
This, combined with its toolbox of great-sounding effects, transforms a potentially underwhelming synth into an instrument that’s capable of producing a surprisingly diverse array of timbres and textures. We may have politely scoffed at Yum Audio’s description of Ember as a “vibe-driven” synth, but after spending a few days with it, we’re feeling the vibe.
Yum Audio Ember: Hands-on Demos
YUM AUDIO EMBER: SPECIFICATIONS
- Mac: OS X 10.13 or higher
- Windows: 10 or higher
- Formats: AAX/AU/VST3
- Contact: Yum Audio
