Review: SOLO by TAQS.IM

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It’s a big world out there.

And in that world exists a wondrous variety of musical instruments, from a wide range of regions and traditions. Most of us won’t have the chance to play these instruments – or would butcher them embarrassingly if we tried – but we can get a taste of their sonic profiles from certain virtual instruments and sample libraries.

One such resource is SOLO by TAQS.IM, a hybrid synth including sampled sounds from many instruments originating in the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans, East Asia, India and elsewhere. SOLO aims to provide a “sonic journey” for musicians without the perils of security checkpoint queues or questionable airline cuisine. So stow your passport in the overhead bin and let’s take a closer look.

SOLO is the ultimate tool for composers, producers, and musicians seeking to infuse their compositions with rich global flavours.

In This, You’re On Your Own

One thing I won’t be addressing in this review (outside of this section) is the “A-word”.

That’s because – much like beauty, love and over-compression – “authenticity” lies in the eye (or heart, or ear) of the beholder. Artists from and deeply invested in many musical traditions use the instruments represented here – or sampled versions thereof — to produce music from traditional acoustic to electro dance and everything in between. What qualifies as an “authentic” use of an instrument depends on style, genre and context, for starters.

Also, if what makes a sampled regional instrument “authentic” could be objectively defined, I’m supremely unqualified to attempt it. I enjoy and am inspired by a lot of music and artists from these regions, but my “street cred” in this area extends about as far as Sesame.

Ultimately, SOLO is, as the product page says, a “world synth”. That provides some hint about the genres where it may fit best – namely, “music wot’s got synths in”. Dance, electronic and hybrid styles, with influences from all over.

For many uses, strict “authenticity” isn’t a primary concern, so long as the sampled instruments sound good. (Spoiler: they do.) For more traditional applications, it’s best to have a careful listen to SOLO’s instruments – and a play with the additional features, like MPE and microtonal scales – to see if it fits your particular bill.

Let’s SOLO Together

Now we can dig into what SOLO has on offer. The plugin offers a variety of options accessible via five tabs across the top of the interface. We’ll start with the second tab, Synth.

At its heart, SOLO is a three-oscillator synthesizer, focused mostly on the sampled “world” instruments mentioned above. On the left of the interface are three main options for each oscillator – Sample, Analog and Phase, along with a button to turn each on or off.

Each Analog oscillator provides a type selector (Saw, Tri(angle) or Sin) and selectors to add and dial in noise and/or pulse modulation. Oscillators can also be Sync(hronized), if desired. The Phase oscillator option allows selection of one of six waveforms for carrier and modulator waves as well as adjustments for the PD Phase and Filter Envelope influence.

The One (But Not Only)

But the real meat in SOLO – the heart of the heart, if you like – lies in the Sample oscillator options. Included are 300 sampled instruments to choose from in six categories. One of these categories (Synth) includes nearly seventy patches sampled from synths including the Casio CZ-101, Yamaha DX7 and Oberheim OB-8. But the rest – Bowed, Brass, Keys, Plucked and Wind – are nearly all sampled from actual physical instruments, often with multiple characters or articulations included.

For instance, in the Winds, there are more than a dozen options for the zurna or zurla, including the Zippy Zurla, Zurna Drone and Zurna Arabesque. The Saidi Sax, Sax Balkan and Barky Sax are among the Wind section saxophones. And the Plucked possibilities include multiple bouzouki, cumbus, kanun, oud, santur, saz and tar selections, among many others.

If this veritable cornucopia of choices in SOLO somehow doesn’t satisfy your heaving lust for sampled instrument sounds, then good news – there are two ways to expand the list even further. Thanks to a recent update, SOLO now has expansion pack support, of which TAQS.IM has a couple on offer, with more surely to follow. For a slightly more DIY approach, the plugin can be extended by importing your favorite SFZ, SoundFont or Korg KMP libraries to the preferred sample path.

For all sources, SOLO provides per-oscillator controls for semitone and per-cent tuning, Low Cut and High Cut filters, Pan, Level, ADSR envelope adjustments and envelope trigger modes, providing fine control for each sample or waveform individually.

On the right side of the Synth tab is a section for a global dual-mode filter with its own envelope and trigger controls. Below this are options for Voices, including Poly/Mono/Legato modes, unison controls and Glide, with multiple parameters to adjust the timing, amount and logic for various playing styles.

Solitary Scales

The final element on the Synth tab, just above a virtual keyboard, is a schematic of the current scale, which highlights a major feature in the SOLO synth. Here, you can specify the root key, scale keys and adjust the microtuning of each key independently. If you’re familiar with specific microtuned scales, you can define and save them here. But for many, it’s perhaps easier to simply return to the tabs at top and select the first, Browser.

Like most synth browsers, the main focus of SOLO’s is to select presets, which we’ll get to. But on the right side of this tab, we find the same scale editing widget just discussed – and then a set of eighty pre-defined scales from various regions, several of which are microtonal, or including one or more notes tuned differently than in the twelve-tone chromatic scale.

SOLO includes multiple variants of Turkish and Arabic scales, such as Hijaz, Husenyi and Rast; several Indian Raga scales; scales from China, Ethiopia and Hungary and more. Simply click on a scale, set a root in the widget above, make any additional tuning adjustments and you’re ready to play. You can also save custom scales to add to the list.

To the left of the scales is a Phrases section, where sixty-plus showcase phrases can be previewed. Each uses a specific SOLO preset – Eager Accordion for the Playing Coy preset, for instance – to best show off the melody. Any preset, however, can be swapped in mid-play to see how other instruments sound with the same phrase. And phrases can be dragged as MIDI directly into the DAW for further adjustment and experimentation.

The Supporting Artists

Speaking of presets, SOLO doesn’t skimp on those. On the left in the Browser tab are more than 250 presets in six categories. Presets can be marked as favourites and augmented with user-saved presets as needed.

SOLO’s remaining tabs nicely round out the functionality of a full-featured synth. The Control tab includes two LFOs and an additional ADSR envelope, which can be assigned to modulate an enormous host of parameters in the adjacent Modulation Matrix. An included MIDI CC Matrix provides more control and custom modulation capabilities.

The Effects tab includes options and ordering for up to seven global effects. The Delay and Reverb modules are often active by default (depending on the preset, if one is in use), but Distortion, EQ, Phaser, Ping-Pong Delay and Auto Wah Wah are also standing at the ready, should their services be required. Highlights of the Global tab include controls for aftertouch and MPE settings.

A Single Conclusion

How do these features add up? In practice, SOLO is enormously fun to play. The broad range of sampled instruments sound good alone or layered and the synth options are more than capable of adding depth, zip or buzz to taste. It’s easy to create – or just browse through – presets that both sound and behave wildly differently, thanks to the unique set of microtonal, note triggering and glide options available.

SOLO does a fine job walking a path between meticulously detailed sample libraries and “flagship” synthesizers, borrowing from both, but without much of the faff of either. The sampling isn’t Mariana Trench-deep, with around-the-block round robins or exhaustive articulations – but it is responsive, flexible and supremely playable out of the box. Likewise, the synth controls are relatively sparse, but offer plenty of wave, pulse, noise, phase mod and modulation options to amply support any musical style in SOLO’s wheelhouse, without a thousand knobs and dials to contend with. Every play session has been straightforward, immediate and, yes — fun.

In a single word, working with SOLO has been inspiring. Noodling around with various instruments, presets and phrases, nearly every one sparked an idea for a rhythm, riff or roll to develop and build around. For anyone interested in exploring microtonal scales, regional instruments or modern, upbeat musical styles based on, inspired by or paying homage to the musical traditions referenced here, SOLO could be a valuable addition to your toolkit.

And without an airline peanut packet in sight.

Buy Solo from our partner, Plugin Fox.

Find out more about Solo from TAQS IM