For those of you who just can't wait until the release of Astralis Bion, Homegrown Sounds tides you over with Astralis Baby Bion. This lightweight synth is, in my estimation, undoubtedly a tribute to British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, whose Theory of Mind dictated that thoughts are preexisting, but the capability to think those thoughts is something that must be honed.

The Astralis Baby Bion uses the oscillator from the anticipated Astralis Bion. HGSounds designed Baby Bion with intended use with their free SoundScaper FX plugin in mind. It adds a synth as a sound source because while the effects on SoundScaper always exist, a synth needed be developed to have the capability to apply those synths, just like Wilfred Bion said!

It also adds a flanger / filter, a complex LFO and couple of 32 stage envelopes. HG Sounds admits that its best used for atmospheres and the like, but it also serves as a general purpose synth. It has over 3,500 different waveforms that afford you a variety of mixing options because it would be stupid to have 3,500 of the same waveforms.

Different main features:

• Dual Oscillator -- The Oscillator provides two waveforms which can be mixed using on of the many modes which includes A+B, A-B, Various FM Modes, Dual Pitch, Split and Distorted
• Filter -- Cascadable up to 8 times and includes Low Passes, Hi Passes, Band Passes, Comb, Low Shelf, Hi Shelf and Peak
• 32 Stage Envelopes -- Capable of Repeating Sections, One Envelope is for volume and the second is for the Filter and general purpose, assigned via the Modulation Routing
• Drive -- Auto Volume Distortion
• LFO -- Uniquely Developed LFO with standard Shapes, plus custom shapes with Smooth Control
• SoundScaper -- Comb / Delay / Reverb Effect for creating interesting soundscapes
• Flanger / Filter -- Switchable between Flanger and Filter effect, LFO has over 300 predefined shapes with smooth control as well as standard shapes
• FX Routing -- Three different Paths available
• Modulation Routing -- Multiple options for assigning Modulators to Destinations
• Stereo Spread -- Allows setting a random value to the Pan of each voice