SquareSynth 2

What it does

An 8-bit synth whose voices come from the NES and Commodore 64 chips. Waveform selection sits alongside semitone and fine tune, an amplitude envelope, a width control and high and low pass filters with cutoff and resonance, plus a unison button that collapses the synth to mono and glide on some patches. A second page holds drawable tables that step pitch, waveform, pulse width, gain or filter, with length, speed, shift and smoothing controls, so one held key can carry a rhythm or an arpeggio.

In the demo

Jade runs eight instances in AUM, most of them fed by Scaler and two voiced as kick and snare from Poly Bud, and plays back a Bubble Bobble cover she built in GarageBand. She then opens it standalone and works through the factory presets.

Worth knowing

The sliders take precise aim, and Jade repeatedly fails to catch them with either a finger or a pencil. It runs standalone or as an AUv3, and the interface will not fill the screen in GarageBand.