Do you get so engrossed in twiddling knobs and tweaking parameters that you forget to actually listen to the sounds you're generating? Sonic Charge Synplant thinks it can help you out of your shoe-gazey rut with a radically new interface.

Synplant does away with silly "knobs" and "faders" and instead features a simulated petri-dish. Sample patches are not tweaked but rather are "grown" in the main Syplant GUI. The idea, here, is that you won't be able to rely on your predictive brain in building sounds from the top-down. In this way, you'll be forced to actually listen to patches that you are "presented" with. It's like an intervention for tweak-addicts.

To be fair, their are some user-controls in Synplant, but they serve more to guide the growing patch rather than dictate a particular parameter. The adjustable controls are "tuning," "atonality," "effect," "release," "wheel scaling," "velocity sens.," and "volume." Exactly what each of these controls does is hard to describe - save volume, of course -- as they will behave differently with each patch. Luckily, you can download a free trial version from Sonic Charge to see if Synplant is right for you.

To get you started, Synplant comes preloaded with 300 patches. A quick listen to these (or to the sound on the Sonic Charge website) will give you a god idea as to the wide sonic palette of the Synplant. Once you're ready to commit to the role of "synth-patch caretaker," you can purchase Synplant for $89 US. It's the next step before having actual kids!