AWESOME sound. Nicely done. I am completely baffled by the decision Urs made to go with the UI he chose for Bazille. I feel like it's going to be held back so much by that slow, slow UI.
How are you finding it?
Bazille definitely is a learning process unless you are familiar with hardware modulars (which I have never used). At first I didn't know what half the modules did or have an idea how to use them. That learning curve is not to do with the UI though.
Bazille is entirely different from most synths. (Lag Generators, Quantizers and Rectifiers?) Anything can be wired to anything. There is no fixed signal path at all. You can use 1 or any combination of the 4 main osc's as the sound source. But then you could also use an lfo or the step sequencer as the sound source. I have a few presets where one of the envelopes is the only sound source!
A synth with a fixed signal path is going to be easier because many decisions are out of the users hands and hardwired by the developer. Most synths do not allow feedback except in a specific and controlled instance. In Bazille, you can for example, take the output of the filter and feed it back into itself. You could take the output of the filter, run it through the quantizer or other modifier and then modulate the same filter or use that for FM on an OSC. In Bazille there is no difference between audio path and modulation path. They cross-over freely and are defined by the user.
So no regular UI could work for this sort of flexibility. Given the nature of Bazille, I think the current UI makes sense. At this point, I enjoy the interface. I am comfortable with it and know how to use all the modules and understand what a preset will sound like when I do something.
I have one preset where an env is multiplied by itself, then sent through the quantizer and lag generator before modulating filter cutoff. Try representing that in a mod matrix!
The UI can get cluttered looking when there are enough wires all over making it hard to follow them. But then it can get hard to figure out what is going on in a preset when you have lots of complex modulation assignments in a mod matrix.