After four years, I parted ways with my ASM Hydrasynth. It’s a very good synth, maybe even a great one, but after four years of fairly regular use, I decided it wasn’t for me and moved it on. Now that it’s gone, I thought it might be worth a look back, to collect my thoughts about the synth and look at both the strengths of it and the issues I had with it, and present all of that in a way that might be useful to others considering this synth.
What is it?
I assume most readers will be well familiar with the Hydra, but if not, let me recap. It’s an 8-voice polyphonic digital synth with a ton of control and sound possibilities. It features 3 oscillators, 2 filters, five each of LFOs and envelopes, plus effects, “mutators,” noise, ring modulation and a deep mod matrix. It lets you create custom wavetables, offers hundreds of basic waveshapes, plus gives you those mutators which do things like sync, pulsewidth mod, FM and more. And all of that is packaged in a remarkably straightforward and usable interface. In short, it’s a powerful, flexible digital wavetable/subtractive synth with a good UI.
What did I like?
The feature list is impressive and the reality mostly delivers. The thing offers a lot of options for sound design and once you get a feel for it (more on that later) it can definitely deliver some remarkable sounds.
The oscillators’ base waveforms are good and the mutators offer a lot of possibilities from the basic synthesis tools to quite esoteric options. The filters are all varying degrees of good, with a few standout models. LFOs and envelopes are extremely flexible and powerful. And the interface manages to pack an incredibly deep synthesis engine into a nearly flat interface with just a few dozen buttons and knobs and a few small screens. It also comes with hundreds of presets, many of which are excellent, if you like presets.
After a good bit of experimentation, I found it best (to my ears/taste/needs, of course) at two things that, ironically, are diametrically opposed. The first is rather straightforward virtual analog sounds – the kind of stuff synths have been doing since day one. The other is weird digital nonsense sounds – experimental, abrasive and distinctive, if not always easy to use.
What didn’t I like?
I mentioned that it did good basic VA sounds, and good weird, digital cruft sounds but it didn’t do much in between very well (to my ears, again). More complex sounds that should have been within its domain – classic wavetable or FM sounds, for example – were difficult or impossible to create, requiring a lot of experimentation, much of it pretty fruitless.
In a somewhat similar vein, a lot of the options it offered actually didn’t offer much depth or useability. The basic oscillator waveshapes are all great, but once you get into the 200+ digital waveshapes there’s just not that much compelling, and going thru them quickly becomes numbing. The mutators are similar. A few, like the wave stack, are straightforward but useful; others like the phase difference are arcane and don’t seem to do much at all. And even the weirder stuff is surprisingly shallow – they tend to offer a few interesting possibilities but quickly devolve into unwieldy digital chaos or noise. The alternate pulsewidth modulation options, for example, went from “that isn’t doing much” to “dear gods, what is that clatter?” with relatively small adjustments, making them hard to use unless insane noise is what you were after.
The effects are, at best, okay: Useable to do some basic sweetening, but nothing compelling or distinctive. Most of the filters are forgettable – you’ll probably pick one or two as your favorite and simply ignore the rest. In short, a lot of the synth is like this – seemingly very deep but actually only offering a small range of “good” stuff.
Was there more useful territory to be found in the deep set of tweakable settings? Maybe, but most of my experimentation went nowhere and wasn’t much fun along the way. And maybe that’s more of my ultimate issue: I just didn’t enjoy programming it that much. It was way too easy to get lost in the weeds. The sweet spots were few and there were no indicators where you might find them. It was way too easy to work on a sound for an hour and realize it sounded like a cheap synth organ preset, buzzy and anemic and boring.
It took a long time to get comfortable with the synth. Despite the excellent user interface, there was so much there to consider. And the synth doesn’t put up many guardrails, much less guidelines – there are sweet spots to be found, but you will have to look. I’d say it took me a good 6-10 weeks of pretty regular use to get really comfortable with it, and I never approached mastery of it.
The interface, as much of a marvel as it is, was pushed to the limit and it could end up feeling like a real chore to create new sounds on it. My average programming time for a new sound was close to an hour, which is pretty high, and the results were only occasionally worth it. And when you have so many control options, it can start to feel mandatory to use them all, which was exhausting in and of itself.
Other Factors that led to my decision:
Only a few months after I got the Hydra, just as I was finally starting to get the hang of it, I lucked into a dummy good deal on another synth, the Korg opsix. I had considered the opsix as an option when I was shopping for a digital poly and ended up buying the Hydra, but passed on because of the cost and the fact that Hydra seemed deeper. Then I got the opsix for half price, and it turns out that the opsix is probably as deep (arguably deeper, but I am not looking to argue) and, for me, easier/more fun to program.
Now none of that is really the Hydra’s fault, but it did weigh into my decision. On some level, I knew as soon as I fell in love with the opsix that the Hydra’s days were numbered (I just didn’t need two digital hardware polysynths in my setup), but I decided to try to find room for both, with mixed success. Later, when I started using soft synths again after a 4 year hiatus, that was the end. Pigments, in particular, covered all the territory I found interesting in the Hydra and lots more. And Pigments is fun to program…
I did give it a thorough try out. I programmed over 100 sounds on it. I used it as my main poly synth during the initial writing and recording phase of my latest album, and did a bunch of layers/overdubs for the album with it later as well. Even after I decided to sell it three or four months ago, I gave it one more intense, deep dive to try and see if I could love it. I programmed a new sound nightly for a couple weeks, and came up with some nice stuff. But in the end, it was time to pass it to someone who could love it so I could reclaim my desktop space and some of my money.
Conclusion:
I bought it new for $799 shipped, no tax. Sold it (via a trade) for $550. So I got to use it for 4 years for $249 – not bad, I guess. Comes to like $5 and change a month! If I’d bought it used (for maybe $625 if I’d found a deal at the time) it would have been even more reasonable.
Despite my lukewarm appreciation of the synth, I do think it’s an excellent synth that could go down as an all timer. I didn’t jell with it, but a lot of people do, and you could be one of them. It’s definitely worth a try out if you are into hardware synths and like a deep dive. Or, for that matter, if the presets speak to you (I used a small handful as secondary layers on my recent album, but otherwise ignore/erase presets in general). Be aware of the things I mentioned and consider buying used ($550-$650 these days for the desktop model I had) and you won’t go wrong, since you’ll be able to recover most/all of your money if you don’t love it either.
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Very interesting write up, and pretty much encapsulates a lot of my feelings with this synth (which I too have let go after a couple of years of use). I found it hard to say why, but you’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head. I had sold my Soma Lyra and bought this instead but actually found that the Lyra was used on a lot more tracks.