Does Mystic Synth work?

Gave myself a project to make songs entirely from one synth. I’ve been going through the Cubase synths and have arrived at Mystic. I couldn’t make anything work. Most of the controls didn’t seem to affect anything. I was trying to start out with a kick sound and found it impossible. I found a kick preset, copied it exactly with another instance of Mystic but the sound was completely wrong. Is this synth broken or am I doing something wrong?.. I also had stability and tuning issues with the Spectre synth but was at least able to achieve something. Prologue on the other hand was fine.

Did just a few tests, using Mystic in an Instrument track. It works as expected, here, including the controls, at least on its UI…

More precisions would be welcomed : in which way the “sound was completely wrong” ?

What I meant was when I tried to recreate the kick preset that already exists on Mystic on another instance of Mystic the resulting sound was completely different from that original preset even though I had copied the settings exactly and nothing like a kick drum, just a fuzzy mess.

I just opened Mystic up up again to take another look. It seems the controls on the top middle section “Course, Raster, Morph and Cut” don’t affect the initial sound at all. It’s possible I just don’t understand the workflow.

Anyway thanks for the reply.

Just tested it again, doing these :

  1. Created an instrument track with Mystic chosen as instrument. I browsed in the presets list and used the only ‘Kick Drum’ preset : BassDrum909. Sound was alright, so…
  2. … I used the Copy Mystic setting (right-click in the VSTi UI background).
  3. Created another instrument track, as a second instance of Mystic.
  4. Pasted the settings of the first instance in it, with Paste Mystic Setting (again, right-click in the VSTi UI background).

Result : both instances work perfectly, with the same sound. After this, I tried the following controls that you pointed. Coarse and Cut definitely work. The Raster, Morph and Damping ones don’t, it seems, but it’s probably the preset structuration that makes them inefficient, as they are perfectly working for other presets (ex. : Synth>Rotation).

Overall, Mystic works as expected here, but I have never used it much, I admit, so I’m not truely aware about the synthesis principles and sound shaping on it.

Interesting…
I followed your four steps with the same results as you had. Incidentally I didn’t know about the copy settings option so thanks for that.
Then I tried to recreate the kick drum preset again without copying and pasting and once again couldn’t replicate it. The result sounds more like a nasty snare than a kick.

You are right about the controls. They work fine in the presets but I can’t seem to work them from the initial patch. As you say might be to do with the workflow of the synth.

Anyway thanks for your help.

Yep, and I got more or less the same result as you, when trying to rebuild the preset from scratch, this, even after having patiently redraw more or less the same “Spectrum displays” with the Custom parameter set (it’s a nightmare to use, by the way). This, add to the fact that the Plug-in Reference says that there are three comb filters and a varaiable low-pass one which don’t clearly appear in the UI, makes the shaping of a tone more or less a hit or miss process.

This synth is rather strange : my basic VCO->VCF->VCA thinking scheme is completely overwhelmed by this one, the most disconcerting thing being that the fundamental physical concept that is the frequency is of no use, in it.

Now I know why I never truely try to use it : life is short and one must be truely motivated to get something useful of it, beside the existing presets. But maybe we are missing something… :neutral_face:

Hi Shay,

The Raster, Morph, Cut and Crackle parameters work on the original Bassdrum909 preset. Changed the settings according to what is shown in the picture and you have an altered Bass Drum sound with noises occurring with a pattern that looks regular (Play 16 quarter notes to hear the pattern repeat). The Damping (Low Pass Filter) parameter does not seem to change this tone.

What I could read on this forum is that these three synths are from a discontinued VST from Steinberg which was originally called D’Cota which was very similar to TERA from VirSyn (http: //www.virsyn .de / en / E_Products / E_TERA / e_tera.html). Steinberg seems to have included in Cubase the three modules of this synth in the form of three independent synths.

Mystic

Yep, drawing in that spectrum box isn’t easy alright. Like you say its very hit and miss so I think I’ll have to exclude Mystic from my “make songs from scratch” project this time. Thanks for your help @cubic13. At least I know now it’s not just me!

Thanks for that @Rene_L . Yes, as far as I can tell the controls work fine on the presets but not on the default patch. I was trying to make a tune starting from the init patch which is why I was wondering whether they worked or not.
Interesting background on the synth. Of the three I’ve messed with only Prologue seems to be working fully normally. I also had some weird issues with the Spectre and as this thread shows Mystic is a write off for me I’m afraid.

I don’t know if this can help, but I found this on the forum:

Good Luck!