Tone2’s Icarus3 Oscillator DeepDive

Markus Krause is one of the audio plugin industry’s finest developers. His synthesisers have a unique ‘rubberiness’ you won’t find in any other company’s product line-up. And now, after around 20 years of releasing synths and effects, he has decided there will be no more new products from Tone2; only updates to keep things working.

As customers of Tone2, we had a good run. Some ground-breaking DSP techniques were provided to us in his synths (Impulse Modelling Synthesis anyone? or Harmonic Cross Modulation?) which invited us to explore sonic territory previously unavailable to us. And they still do! They’re all still for sale, and will continue to be until the internet dies or something ghastly happens to us all.

After playing around with Icarus3 for a while, I was quite aware that the oscillators contain power not previously witnessed in any other synth on the software shelves right now. A zillion different, and characterful, super/hyper saws, the morphmodes have a tonne of waveshaping, FM, formant adjustment and more all of which can be modulated, give us a palette of sounds with a particular digital flavour.

It became clear I needed to do a DeepDive into one single oscillator, to explore every single PlayMode and MorphMode as well as the other modes (Resynthesis, Vocoding, Granular) so people could get a sense of the colours available to them from this synth, and there are a LOT!

So here’s my garishly-titled 90-minute DeepDive into one single oscillator from Tone2’s Icarus3.