What is, on the surface, a simple grain slicer with a couple of delay loops, actually turns out to be an incredible sound design tool. As existing users will know, one of Absynth's major strengths has always been the vast range of sounds you can coax from any one module, and this new one certainly lives up to that standard.

The next big new addition is the Aetherizer effect. Speaking of the Browser, a simple set of eight rotaries to dial in basic sound qualities such as distortion, resonance, bass and treble now occupies the bottom part of this tab and provides the most instantly usable addition in this area. In fact, it would be worth it for the addition of a master FX disable switch alone, which is still inexplicably missing from the browser screen (and this despite a Mutate button being added to every one of Absynth's eight tabs, nice touch though that may be). We think that the patch overview box would be put to far better use as a master module activate/deactivate control, so that you could switch modules in and out on the fly - rather than having to dive into the patch screen - as you navigate Absynth's library of dense and complex sounds. While this can certainly help make mutations less unwieldy once you've isolated the correct modules, again, Absynth patches are often so involved that it might take you a few minutes just to work out which modules are doing what, thus defeating the point of a feature that's supposed to allow you to create new sounds 'in seconds'. You can, however, mutate just a part of your patch The Mutator control features a handy little box that enables you to select which modules you want to mutate and which should be left alone. So once you're ready to go, you can start to use these guys on your own.'Mutator isn't massively useful in practice: mutated patches just aren't nearly as perfectly crafted as the originals.' So all the macros should already be sitting there, and if you hit Command M and do MIDI Learn, you can actually MIDI Learn these guys very easily using your MIDI controller. So I'm going to go ahead and open this up, and they're already configured. Now if I want to do it with a controller, I have to configure these guys. So you can see Filter Res, Effect Master Time.

Now, one of the things I might want to do is actually use a controller, so if I want to I could just choose Absynth 5 and then choose these macro controllers that it renamed based on the things that I chose. And all we're going to do is find those in the envelopes over here on the right. I've set up a simple little beat here with an Absynth patch that has a couple of macros going. All right, now it's time to automate in Ableton Live.

Absynth 5 in abelton