FabFilter Twin 3

It needs more wave types, and it will be perfect!

I have just purchased this as it was on sale and have had a little play, but enough for me to know that this is going to be one of my favourite IOS synths. The tweak-ability is astounding. In only a few short minutes I have managed to completely change one of their admirable presets into something altogether different. I’ve hooked it up via AUM to Zoa and the results are just amazing. A must.

Takes a lot to impress me, but this synth is a LOT… and I have 100’s. This is going to get well used along with all your other apps I bought this week. Winner/Winner 🥇🏆

This is one of the best sounding synths I’ve used. Rich, alive sounding oscillators and really nice filters. Unfortunately the user interface is not at all touch friendly with using fingers so I think I will have to buy a pencil to make the most of it.

Top quality sound as you’d expect from FF. Some negatives : 1) the interface is not great to work with, very fiddly 2) not that deep modulation wise, can’t even use the oscillators as modulators or for xmod. Still worth it if you can get it discounted or in the bundle deal.

I really liked this from about the second I hit some keys. Having got rid of my admittedly not terribly expensive small synths (Roland’s baby synth I think), in favour of going all-in on iPad Pro M1 soft synths, I have no experience of ‘other versions’ or platforms/OS of this product. My criticism is only the same as any top synth on iOS/iPadOS now, the level of automation possible. It’s lovely to be able to slide around some on-screen XY pads, but it would REALLY be great if GarageBand would record those actions as well as the obvious pitch bending and mod wheel movements. I don’t know if Cubasis would make a more comprehensive job of faithfully recreating every form of adjustment along the way, or if it’s a FabFilter omission? Anyway, it’s lovely. The sounds seem just that bit higher quality, possibly this is FF’s other expertise or chunks of their EQ product etc being embedded, I don’t know. It’s up there with the iOS biggies anyway. I know some might see this as a lazy port-over, but I am not qualified to judge that, I am just grateful to have it. Price is always going to be a hurdle as the quality improves of iOS/iPadOS music apps and AUv3 plugins, but down through the ages (!) the good stuff has been expensive in the music world. It’s okay as long as the hits don’t come too thick and fast. Twin 3 is one of those synths I can’t see anyone regretting they obtained it. The signal chain used on my iPad Pro M1 was all in GarageBand, with the latest iPadOS 16.3.1 and latest GB itself, just the GB standard compressor first, then I did go upmarket a bit with a splash of some echo and an amp sim from Overloud’s THU. T3 sounded pretty great through just that, and it’ll take a while for the controls, graphical and otherwise, to sink in, to make sounds a bit less ‘stock’. Oh yes, the one other bane of synth life on iPad Pro music-making keeps rearing it’s head, the fantastic swipe-bar at the bottom, cuts beautifully into FabFilter’s lowest set of features placed on-screen. I was very happy with a Home Button, tbh, but can just about make the features down there turn on and off, without flinging the whole GB song into limbo for a minute as iPad thinks the user wants to give up mid-tweak. If Apple would just let us turn it off somehow for certain specialist applications, and substitute something else, that would do as a workaround. No complaints apart from those two really: more comprehensive automation like the X-Y pads would be fantastic; blesse

Slightly fiddly controls fade into obscurity when you plug your headphones in and hear how big and beautiful and clean and juicy this synth sounds. Great stuff!

Really beautiful, but slightly disappointing. There’s so much subtractive synthesis available and I know this focuses on purity, modulation, and fantastic filters. But why not give those filters more to work with? Adding something as simple as a modulatable waveshaper as an additional oscillator control (with a choice of shapers) would have taken the standard purity of traditional oscillators into new areas. Or if they wanted to increase the flexibility, a simple wave table library as one of the oscillator ‘waveform options’ would have given a layer of options when you have 4 oscillators to work with. This is a beautiful synth that feels like it would have been a massive hit 4 years ago. All it needs to put it at top of many needs is a few small simple twists to catapult its capabilities to cover more 2023 needs.

Great but the little “x” is too small to tap on…

This synth has one *incredibly unique* feature that I don’t see many people talking about - the ability to sidechain audio to it and then use that audio to modulate anything. Are you kidding me? That is REALLY REALLY cool and opens up a lot of possibilities (and ultimately the reason I bought this). Unfortunately at the moment this feature doesn’t seem to be available on iOS (I’ve tried in both AUM and Cubasis and there doesn’t seem to be a way to route audio to it). Other than that, it’s fantastic synth. Crossing my fingers that this will be added soon!