Control panel for the nuclear reactor on the NS Savanah — the first nuclear power merchant ship from 1959. The use of color here helps and is no doubt part of the design.
There is enough material on synths with block diagram UIs to be worth starting a thread.
I wish that they had figured out a better way to show the Mutants within the flow. I can understand why they did it the way they did, but it can make it hard to explain that the Osc’s are always the outputs, and the Mutants are wave shaping/manipulation tools, not audio processing effects. Minor gripe, but I’ve seen it derail multiple troubleshooting/help threads online
The Mutants are weird things indeed. I don’t know if there is a good representation. Definitely took me a while to get my head around them, what they do and how to use them. I just had to play with them a lot. Plus they all behave in different ways. Add to that you can take the output of all the Mutants as inputs various places too. Perhaps there is a better representation somehow, but it’s never formed in my mind.
I do like the design though with Mutants, they’re part of the whole Hydrasynth gestalt. A very modular synth sort of thing.
Enjoyed watching this…
Actually, the mutants are audio processors. The original waveform is still available as FM source for example, and also the dry/wet controls allow you to blend in the original sound with the “mutated” sound.
The only thing is: they are all audio processors intended to work like waveform shapers.
I had an opportunity to test out the Explorer’s performance on batteries the other day when a winter storm knocked out our power. After a few hours of playing and sound design, the battery indicator still looks pretty high! This has to be the richest sound design platform out there which can use conventional batteries. Sort of a super-Volca. I was also grateful for the backlit buttons since it got pretty dark 
After spending a lot of time playing around with Live 11, I’m finding that a lot of the chains of effects, etc. I build there can easily be replicated right in the Hydra. I might still turn off the built-in delay and reverb when I’m back at my desk to use external effects (though I’d be missing out on the post-FX filter, etc), but it’s becoming really easy and straightforward to get something going that sounds really interesting. I think the flexible nature of the mod matrix, where you get to pick the source and destination (and what destinations you get!), rather than filling in a pre-defined grid ala Micro/Minifreak, helps a lot with that. Also the note latch function is easier to use than on the Microfreak, which is great for drones.
I’m tempted by the Deluxe, but there is something cute, fun, and approachable about the small all-in-one Explorer and I’m waiting to see how the Osmose early adopters get on with it.
IIRC the MicroFreak’s hold is the same as the Shift+Key Latch = Sustain on the Hydrasynth. That’s useful if you want to sustain notes without a sustain pedal.
FM-Lin can’t be used to get a clean signal in from the second mod source outside the Deluxe. Only the Ring Mod can be clean.
Throwing other synthesizers into the Hydrasynth’s distortion is pretty fun though.
I’m fairly positive that this is incorrect based on an interview that one of the ASM guys (either Glen or Dom) gave closer to release, but I can’t find the YT vid to share my source, so now I’m stuck in limbo. If I find it, I’ll come back and post because it was pretty interesting (and very clear that the Mutants were not audio processors)
Only the FM-Lin Mutant from the Manual:
But it will always have some form of frequency modulation of the input.
The Ring Mod is the only one where you can set the depth to 0 so it comes out as is, unmodified.
Probably belongs more in this thread but here’s a comparison with a Model D reissue:
Edit: people don’t read, sick of replies.
Don’t understand the “get synth A and make it sound like synth B”
When synth A should sound like synth A 
It’s it’s own thing…right?
I’d try different envelope curves…
Whoah he played Let’s Hear It For The Boy! Rad!
Which filter, there’s like 18 different types and they behave differently.
I end up adjusting the Delay and Release curves on almost all of my patches, certainly any that have obvious Env>filter modulation or an amp that tails off in the open. To my ear, the perfectly linear default can sound unnatural in a lot of scenarios. I also tend to use less resonance than I think I need (the visualization tricks me I think), and always have a bit of filter drive.
Whatever it is, the tools are there to fix it
This is how I view the synth in general. You really start on the most neutral ground and have to deliberately work your way towards the characteristics you want.
Been having fun with the additional features of the Desktop and improved workflow over the Explorer. I’ll probably sell the Explorer eventually so this is more of a sidegrade.
This definitely answered the question I had whether I liked the Explorer for the sound engine/workflow or the expressive keyboard and it seems like it’s just the sound engine/workflow which the Desktop improves a fair bit.
It did a good job of eliminating the much more expensive Expressive E Osmose (and other keyboard synths) so I know I’ll be sticking with only desktop modules going forward.
Alright my friends, I’m a new Hydra Explorer owner as of yesterday. Been very excited to dive into this thing so I figured I’d share some first impressions from my few hours of messing around so far:
It’s a lot of fun! Feels so quick/easy to fly around the panel, tweak and shape your sound, get an idea going with the arp or get lost in poly aftertouch experiments. Fun factor is very high.
It sounds great. I know it’s a soulless VST in a box yadda yadda but it sounds wonderful to my ears. I feel like I have all the tools I need to steer the sound in one direction or another, so it’s hard to imagine running into any serious sonic limitations here.
The presets are… fine? I’m probably going to remove most of them to make room for my own patches. I don’t love using presets because I prefer to know what’s going on under the hood, and with Hydra it seems too tedious to check every page to deconstruct a preset (but maybe someone else has tips for this process? or learnings from the presets in general?).
I was nervous about the 4 knobs/parameters per page on the Explorer vs. the full 8 on the other models, but so far I’m finding this layout to be very comfortable to work with. It’s easy to look at 4 parameters at once; I’ve spent a lot of time with the A4 which has (up to) 10 parameters per page, and that’s much more mentally taxing. Explorer feels like a leisurely jaunt through sound design by comparison.
I nudged the big knob by accident a couple times and lost the patch I was working on (I know there’s a setting to prevent this, need to look into it). I kind of wish I could assign a different function to that knob, it’d be sweet to tie it to a macro or filter cutoff or whatever.
Overall I’m very happy with it, though I acknowledge this is the honeymoon phase and that’s bound to happen. Maybe the charm will wear off. But I got the Hydra to have something more playable and expressive around to complement my modular and Elektron gear, and I feel like I hit the target there. The plan is to make a lot of patches, get comfortable playing/tweaking it, then sample my ideas into other machines to form patterns/arrangements/etc. For now I’m content to just be poking around the panel and saying “whoa” a lot.
Make sure you update all of them to the V2.0 presets. The Legacy ones aren’t as curated.
