In the modern world of music production, the set of tools available to us is immense. Most DAWs come shipped with at least a few different synths, and with the endless possibilities from synthesis types, filter selection, modulation, FX engines and not to mention affecting your sound with other VSTs, the ability to commit to a sound texture, or to know how your ideas will translate to the club or a festival sound system becomes a complex question.
It’s this complexity that can sometimes get in the way of creating. Personally, the idea of loading up a synth and preset hopping can be inspiring in a way that crafting all of your own sounds individually can’t do – it’s instantaneous and most of the time backed by a preset creator with serious synth chops.
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Enter the Memory Rites Current Expansion Player, a new plugin from Minimal Audio which offers a stripped back interface while still packing the full power of their flagship Current synth. This audio plugin launched alongside Memory Rites, the new set of sounds built for Minimal Audio’s Current by experimental electronic musician, EPROM.
For those unfamiliar with EPROM, he’s an electronic music artist with releases spanning back to 2007, making music in the broader experimental and bass music genres, alongside IDM, drum and bass, acid and downtempo electronica. It’s from this wide-ranging bed of sound design expertise that this collection of sounds is birthed.
Under the hood, the implementation of EPROM’s vision is the same – it’s the same fully capable Current synth engine with its deep synthesis tools. The Expansion Player is just a cool way to let users play and own these sounds without purchasing Current itself, although those who want to dive in and tweak the presets further can get the full version and have immediate access.
This player comes with 60 sounds to play with, including 25 basses, 14 leads, 9 pads, 6 keys and 6 SFX patches, although some of these could be used interchangeably. Take the Sheffield to Groningen preset for example – it’s listed as a pad but could very easily be a soft lead sound by playing it an octave higher than usual. Or Chainsaw Badness, which is a gritty bass but played in the C3-C4 range becomes a saw-ish lead sound.
The Expansion Player satisfies the complexity issue I was talking about earlier with ease. Its four macros offer enough control over the overall timbre to shape the sound in a way that felt like my own while staying true to the original vision of EPROM. While I was using it, inspiration struck at multiple times, especially when using the randomise feature which alters the position of the four macros.
During testing, the player performed great – no technical hiccups, pretty modest CPU usage and the presets change and load almost instantly. Now onto the sounds.
In the plugin overall there’s a great range of sounds, from subtle and deep pads to disgusting crunchy leads that make you pull a stank face every time you press a key. There are full frequency spectrum bass patches that sound both fat and focused at the same time, alongside a sprinkling of SFX.
Log or Riddim is one of my favourites – it’s the kind of plucky bass you’d hear in a UKG track with an ephemeral reverb on the ‘space’ macro knob that really puts it into another dimension. As an electro head, the Aquabahn Speed Limit preset is my personal favourite. It exudes the pokey, ever-changing, LFOs-applied-all-over-the-place sound that the name references while still being consistently interesting. Chuck a short gated arpeggiator on it and it sings like the deep sea. I definitely spent over half an hour playing with this sound and it will find a place somewhere in my productions sometime soon.
For most of the sounds, the macros do a great job of allowing the creation of movement and transforming a sound from dark to light, or straight up to spacious and vice versa. Quite a few of the presets, like Sequenz Alpha have a macro dedicated to “breakdown”, pulling the sound out of the full frequency spectrum and dousing it in FX to create effortless transitions between sections. This preset in particular could form the basis for most of the melodic parts of your track – with one key push there’s a pulsing bass, a lead sequence and a small noisy rhythmic shaker.
There is some very tidy routing and signal chain management to FX on some of these sounds, like Raw Data Stab or Trance Slicer, where when notes are held, the main sound is pushed forward in front of the FX, and when released, the tail is more effected. Very typical for genres where your full-spectrum bass takes up most of the mix while it’s in there.
There are some output limiter options, with a soft clip mode which is more subtle, and a “glue” mode which sounds a touch more aggressive than the soft clip option when pushing sounds far into the red. Most of the presets stay out of the red zone, but the option to push them is there if you choose to.
You can obviously find some of EPROM’s signature concepts executed in this plugin, with the patches Exponent Advisor and Stereolake having a changing speed arpeggiator similar to the lead arpeggiator used in the track Motion Blur from his Syntheism album from 2023.
Overall, my experience with the Current Expansion Player and the Memory Rites sounds from EPROM was great – most presets were highly usable and had a unique flair that would help them stand out in a mix. The macros are expertly tuned and the plugin performance was excellent.
For electronic music producers, especially those who come from the bass music side of the spectrum, this range of sounds is a sure-fire win with playable, mix-ready tones that can be tweaked to suit your taste and vibe. Even if you’re not from the bass music side of things, the 808-style bass as well as complex keys, pad sounds and SFX could fit within many genres of music.
There are two ways to get access to these sounds: the Memory Rites Expansion Player, the subject of this review, which gives access to the 60 sounds and macro-level control over the sound timbre, or purchasing Current, the fully fledged synth, and buying the preset pack there. Minimal Audio also has a rent-to-own program, which gives access to their whole suite of plugins, sounds and presets with credits to purchase the things you want to keep forever later.
Check Memory Rites out yourself here.
