Who better to make the formal introductions, then, than the company’s namesake Managing Director, Rob Papen, professional sound designer and resident Rob Papen progressive product ‘dreamer’ par excellence: “PRISMA provides the Rob Papen ‘sound garden’ with ways of providing terrific tone colours by combining these into a single ‘prismatic’ sound source,” he starts, somewhat poetically. “Powerfully, PRISMA stores those stacked software instruments and all their respective settings as a single preset. Of course, there’s a whole lot more to this than might first meet the eye since users can open each single software instrument individually and easily edit and creatively combine it wonderfully with any other stacked software instruments from Rob Papen to create a whole new range of PRISMA sounds!”

Seriously smart features of note include individual VELOCITY or KEYB. RANGE (keyboard range) split layers for creative combinations. Owners of Rob Papen’s Punch — its award-winning drum synthesis/sampler software instrument with built-in grooves that can be triggered — will take delight in the fact that PRISMA perfectly adapts to that feature favourite by also allowing keyboard range selection for those grooves. Get into the groove with PRISMA by using Punch to generate background rhythms!

Creative combinations within PRISMA are almost limitless. Let’s try picturing a PRISMA preset with a pad from BLUE-II, for instance — itself excellently embodying Rob Papen’s present-day vision to devise a powerful dream synth by building upon the success of the original BLUE, a bona fide soft synth classic developed in close collaboration with RPCX (Rob Papen ConcreteFX) partner and music software developer Jon Ayres nigh on a decade ago (cleverly combining FM and subtractive synthesis with Phase Distortion and waveshaping synthesis to create self-styled ‘Crossfusion Synthesis’) and skyrocketing its innovations onwards and upwards, together with an arpeggiated sound, say, from Predator — ‘phat’ analogue-sounding soft synth with killer presets and first-class features from Rob Papen, combined with a cutting- edge sound from Blade — representing the cutting-edge of soft synth development, and adding a groove from Punch… picture perfect!

PRISMA also has four top-quality FX on board, allowing users to bypass the individual software instruments’ inbuilt effects to save on computer resources, ready for building picture perfect PRISMA sounds! 

Still better, PRISMA is available for any Rob Papen user to download for free! Simply stack any already-owned Rob Papen software instruments to use (or create new) PRISMA presets using those software instruments at their disposal, even if it’s just a case of combining multiple instances of BLUE-II, Predator, or any other Rob Papen product. PRISMA, of course, comes packed with a wide range of professionally-programmed presets, including stacks that only use instances of the same software instrument… in case the user only owns one Rob Papen product.

PRISMA really comes into its own when used with eXplorer-III, The Complete Rob Papen Synth & Effect Collection, combining all of the company’s multi-award-winning Mac- and PC-compatible software instruments — including the relatively recently-released RAW soft synth specialising in ‘distorted’ sounds specifically suited to EDM (electronic dance music production) and beyond — and also all of its critically- acclaimed effects plug-ins into an attractively-priced performance and sound design dream bundle to die for. Fortunately, eXplorer-III also installs PRISMA as part of the bundle, so eXplorer-III users will no longer have to worry about installing it for themselves.

Note that eXplorer-III, Rob Papen’s all-encompassing software bundle, will include PRISMA as standard, bringing its total product count to 15; priced at €585.00 EUR (including VAT/tax)/$599.00 USD, this represents a significant cost saving of over 50% when compared to separately purchasing each and every Rob Papen virtual instrument and effects plug-in included!