Review: PX Apollo Synthesizer Plugin by UVI

UVI PX Apollo Synth Plugin Review

UVI has released the first in its prototype series, the PX Apollo synth plugin based on the Moog Apollo a rare synthesizer prototype from the early ’70s of which there are only 2 in known existence this instrument was the precursor to one of the world’s first polyphonic synthesizers. That sounds pretty interesting, right? Well luckily for us the team at UVI thought so too and went through the painstaking process to go out find one of the two then restore it and sample it into the wonderful sounding plugin you are reading about today.

The soundbank in PX Apollo has just over 4000 samples which are molded together in 153 presets and they sound great for modern music and also for vintage type music. Here are some examples from UVI to have something nice to listen to while you are reading this review and so you can hear the sounds that come out of the PX Apollo.

PX Apollo works as a sound bank in UVI’s flagship synth Falcon (Falcon Review) and is compatible with UVI’s free Workstation.

Vintage showcase

The PX Apollo is a three oscillator soft synth that produces some really great warm sounds with 4 round robins on each of the fourteen sounds in OSC A, the multi-sampled bass OSC and a wavetable synth for OSC B the PX Apollo does what the UVI synths are popular for mixing different types of synthesis together to create something awesome and, in my opinion, UVI has done a great job with this one.

The PX Apollo is divided up into five pages: Main, Edit, Mod, FX, and Arp.

The main page has three oscillators an amp envelope the filter section and the preset selection box. The OSC A is one of the multi-sampled oscillators and these can be changed with the 14 blue buttons each of these has a really nice character just being played on their own, OSC B is the wavetable synth and has 12 tables loaded up for you and sound great together with the multi-sampled oscillator but I’m betting that these can be modified quite easily in Falcon.

The Edit Window is where you can yes you guessed it edit your sounds by changing the pitch or changing the stereo fields by adding some unison or setting some vibrato, tremolo or your filter to the mod-wheel all these settings can be set to the oscillators separately or on both and can give some great depth, wideness and movement to a static sound.

In the Step Mod window, there is a step modulator and an LFO both of which can be set to both oscillators and separate to modulate the volume, filter, pitch and PWM of the oscillators the amount of which can be set with the corresponding sliders just noodling around in this section can yield some really interesting results.

The FX section of the PX Apollo houses five types of effects drive, chorus, phaser, delay and a reverb these FX sound great and are easy to set too however you like there aren’t too many knobs so that’s good for novices but if you go into the edit pages of Falcon you can go as crazy as you like as for example, the reverb is the sparkle verb with a few macros so fully customizable if you need it to be.

On the Arp Page is where you will find two Arps one for OSC A and one for OSC B this is set up nice to easily be able to create for one simple arpeggio but also bounce them around to get nice polyrhythms and such goodness.

In conclusion, the PX Apollo synth plugin is a great sounding sample/wavetable hybrid synth that produces a host of warm vintage sounds or more modern-sounding sounds at the drop of a hat it’s easy to work with but fully customizable under the hood and if this is the first in the range of prototype synths I can’t wait to see what is going to come next.

Pros:

• Intuitive, very easy to produce great sounds.
• Fully customizable
• (Personal pro) I just love the vintage look

Cons:

• I don’t have a reason to keep a soldering kit nearby

PX Apollo is available for both Windows and MAC OS (OS X 10.11 El Capitan supported) as a standalone application or in VST, AAX, Audio Units (32 and 64-bit) plugin formats.