Novation Peak
Five things I love about this synthesizer
1: reverb
If you've watched any Peak videos before, you've probably heard people gush about it. There's a good reason for it. It sounds amazing. And since slapping reverb on something almost universally makes it sound better, slapping great reverb on it makes it sound very good.
2: sound palette
The Peak lets you produce an enormously wide range of sounds. It has three oscillators with virtual analog waveforms, wavetables (including 10 slots for custom user tables), FM, and virtual sync. It has an analog filter and distortion. It has three envelopes, four LFOs, a fairly large mod matrix, and poly aftertouch. It has chorus/flanger, delay, and reverb effects. With all these tools at your disposal you can easily create an extensive and diverse library of sounds, or write an entire album exclusively with the Peak and never feel limited.
3: build and value
It feels incredibly solid and every part of the synth seems well made. It's also quite compact, which is very convenient for me given my limited space. At $1000 used, considering all its features, I think it's pretty good value, at least in the expensive world of synthesizers.
4: distortion
There are three stages of distortion in this thing. Pre-filter, post-filter, and an additional post-VCA, pre-FX distortion unit. You can really drive the Peak and when you do, it sounds crunchy and delightful.
5: Novation Components
I'm staring at a Roland TR-6S that comes with a pathetic virtual “editor” that makes no attempt at helping you properly organize patches and kits. By comparison, Components is a godsend. The ability to live audition patches and wavetables without committing them to the Peak's memory is awesome, and the wavetable editor has made creating wavetables feel more accessible to me than any soft synth ever has.
Five things I don't love
1: oscillator controls
Six of the 15 knobs in the oscillator section are dedicated to pitch modulation, but they're rarely useful. Most of the time, pitch modulation is used across all three oscillators, and for a range of reasons it's much more convenient to set this in the mod matrix. I probably touch every knob on the Peak when making a patch — except for these.
It would have been better to break up the wavetable shaping controls, as they often force you to continually go back and forth between setting the starting point and adjusting the modulation amount, making you constantly find where you'd last left the knob for the previous setting. Considering that even a tiny change can make a difference in the timbre of a patch, this is a major hassle.
I would have also loved to see at least one encoder devoted to FM depth, like on the Summit. The Peak is actually quite capable at FM, so it's strange the only FM knob on the entire panel is the least important one.
2: mod matrix
It's just not very quick to use, due to having to continually page through slots and scroll through sources and destinations. Also, I understand it was probably done to avoid breaking old patches, but updates that introduced new mod parameters added those at the end of the previous ones, so many related parameters are broken up. For example, the Attack/Decay/Release controls for the amp envelope are all together, but you have to scroll past another 17 parameters to get to the Sustain.
It's also not helpful to have two separate matrices with different parameters. You have to tab through 10 pages in the FX settings to get to the FX mod matrix, only to discover it probably doesn't have the mod sources you want. It feels unexpectedly limiting at times. The most egregious omission is the inability to modulate the filter envelope depth.
3: resonance
I normally like playing with filter resonance, especially when it can self-oscillate — but the Peak's just...doesn't sound good, in my opinion, and has a hard time remaining stable enough to allow for precise sound design.
4: serial FX routing
By default, Peak processes effects in parallel. However, a later update added the ability to process effects in series, which is more common in the synth space. This is great, except it doesn't do it properly.
With parallel processing, the effect knobs are effectively sends. At maximum level, you hear a 50% dry/50% wet signal. But with serial processing, Peak introduces a slightly delayed copy of the dry sound into the wet audio path. The “wet” signal is no longer actually wet, but a dry/wet mix, with the effect knobs controlling the mix level. Unless one of those effects is fully wet (not likely with Chorus/Delay/Reverb), whatever amount of the copied dry sound still remains in the final wet signal then clashes with the original dry signal, creating combing and loudness issues.
There's no proper workaround. The closest thing to a fix is to set the dry level to 0%, leaving you with just the “wet” signal, which is, again, a dry/wet mix. Then you'll be able to hear what you're supposed to be hearing. But you give up using the Bypass button on the panel, which now mutes the whole synth instead of bypassing only the effects. This whole thing could be fixed by simply removing the duplicate dry signal at the end of the serial processing path, but a Peak representative was adamant this is a feature, not a bug. Given the inconsistency and the complete lack of mention in the manual, I very much doubt it.
5: animate buttons
These are not exactly a con, but they feel like a bit of a miss — like Novation realized it needed more ways to provide expression but couldn't find the room for macro knobs. Toggling modulations on or off is better than nothing, but it feels limiting and sadly, isn't actually suitable for playing expressively. They serve more as buttons you push to change your preset into a slightly different preset, which, again, is better than nothing, but feels a bit stilted.