Product Review Series

GUI + Deep Creative Coding App for Performance Visuals

Visual Synthesizer (VS) is an interesting and very affordable app — €99 which can also be paid for in a rent-to-own fashion — for interactive music visuals produced by Imaginando, which is based in Braga, Portugal.

The app, which works both as standalone software and as a DAW plugin, is approachable for beginners while also offering extensive scripting affordances for those who are skilled at programming and want to get beyond what the app’s GUI offers.

Imaginando’s YouTube channel offers a comprehensive playlist which walks users through scenarios on how to use the app in their chosen DAW environment. VS is compatible with Ableton Live, Reaper, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Cubase, Cakewalk, Bandlab, Bitwig, PreSonus’s Studio One and can also work with iPads.

VS User Manual

Like TouchDesigner, VS is based on Glsl or OpenGL Shading Language, which is what you’ll be scripting in if you want to pursue the programming side of VS.

VS’s GUI lets you experiment with music reactivity with common visual parameters such as Alpha (transparency), Brightness, Speed, X / Y positioning, Radius, Width, Size and Amount (of the effect), and other parameters too such as Edge, Detail, and Form — the exact set varies based on what side of the app you’re working in and what you’re customizing.

For those who are more experienced with programming performance visuals — for instance, those used to the Max programming environment, vvvv or TouchDesigner — this may initially feel like a very minimal set of parameters to work with, because users of these other enviroments will be used to having many more visual processing objects at their disposal, each of which comes packed with many attribute sets, value ranges, data types and so on.

However, even with this basic set of parameters to manipulate in VS, visual compositions can become quite complex very quickly through use of the Layer Manager (item #4 in the image below) since those parameters can be treated individually when applied to each of the 8 available layers.

The modulation section adds a lot of expressivity to the image output, with multiple waveforms, envelopes and gates available that can be assigned to visual parameters through a mod matrix. Audio files and MIDI can also be used as sources for manipulating live visuals.

My first impressions of using the app is that it seems to be very much tailored to users who want instant gratification, either through exploring the quite varied presets or through acquiring the a preset expansion pack.

This is an aspect of their business model, making the app very affordable but then offering some preset expansion — at the time of this writing, one pack called Perplexon — though the app comes already with both the Factory presets and a shader pack called Retina Refill.

In other words, there’s plenty for newbies to explore and get some interesting ideas going right off the bat. Those who want to get beyond the minimal expansions that are currently available or the main parameter set of the GUI will need to dip into the GLSL side of the app for more customization and fine tuning.

Playing with the app some more — to get beyond my first impressions : ) — the user is invited into the programming world of GLSL, and this is where one would ultimately become a power user of the app if that is a user’s goal.

If you have the GPU power, VS does support 4K resolution, which at the time of this writing is still in the process of becoming the de facto standard for image quality in live music visuals (many VJ loop packs, for instance, are not 4K but HD, though 4K media is becoming increasingly the norm). You can also preview the image output through frame sharing on the same computer, which in my case would be using Syphon since I tested the app on a Mac.

Double clicking on a layer (numbered 1–8 plus a background layer labelled B) in the GUI’s Layer Manager brings up the Material Browser. In VS terminology, the visual content you’re working with in a layer is called a ‘material’ which is essentially Glsl Code. You can clone a preset material in order to bring up an editable version of the code, which prevents you from accidentally wrecking a built-in material preset.

For intermediate users, a good place to start for those who want to go deeper than what the GUI allows, but perhaps not immediately commit to learning GLSL, is to just start modifying the provided code. Making tweaks to the script is a good way to develop a feel for how GLSL works, and get a sense of the programming possibilities.

The online user guide has a section walking you through how to use your own GLSL code and there’s also a YouTube video on the process.

In a nutshell

If you’re new to performance visuals and want instant gratification, the built-in presets, materials, layers, modulation sources and GUI parameter set will get you up and running very quickly and provide for many hours of music reactive visual delight.

If you start to feel constrained with the available materials and parameters or the limited expansion pack options (at the time of writing), you can start tweaking the GLSL code in the materials editor and see what variations you can envision — and because you’re working with text clones of the built-in materials, you won’t accidentally break the app that you’ve paid for!

And if you really like scripting or want to become a creative coding power user, you’ve got the whole computer graphics wonderland of GLSL at your disposal for truly infinite possibilities.

I like the way the app’s design supports the whole learning process, being approachable to both complete novices and experienced software programmers alike, and of course, those who would like to take their practice from the former to the latter side of the experience spectrum.

Beyond Imaginando’s YouTube channel, other users have uploaded their own tutorials and so I’ll close out this article with a few of those videos for you to explore VS if you want to do a bit more research before committing to buy.

Visual Synthesizer by Imaginando was originally published in Sound & Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.