Electronic Sound July 2015 (Regular Edition) | Page 41

EVERYTHING
COUNTS
IN SMALL
AMOUNTS
German manufacturers Ploytec have served up a teeny-weeny hardware synth in the shape of
the Pi L Squared. And what’s more, it’s MIDI-powered. Test drive, anyone?
Words: LUKE SANGER
The thought of trying out the Ploytec Pi L Squared
synthesiser, with its combination of a tiny footprint
and being powered over MIDI, had me instantly
thinking of how it could be incorporated into my live
set-up.
And that was the first let down. When connecting
via MIDI to my Elektron Octatrack, the audio
produced a consistent clicking sound, I assume, as
the MIDI wasn’t delivering enough power. This could
be easily resolved by plugging in the optional USB
power, but that kind of defeated my initial intention
of using it with an all-hardware set-up. Additionally,
plugging a USB cable for the task of powering it in
this instance takes away its main selling point of
being “MIDI powered”.
So, feeling a little deflated I hooked it all up via
Ableton and supplied MIDI from my Fireface 400,
which delivered enough power to avoid the clicking
problem and the set-up only took a few minutes.
The Pi L Squared Synth comes with a little sheet
of MIDI CC destinations and it’s up to you how to
organise them. I originally planned on setting up a
dedicated patch on the Octatrack to control these,
but instead I made do with Ableton MIDI clips

and adjusted the settings from there. The synth is
duophonic (two notes can be played at once) and
only produces a square wave to make its tones. It
uses both a digital and analogue filter to shape the
sound and has all your typical subtractive synth
components like envelope, PWM, LFO etc. I wasn’t
blown away by the sound: it reminded me of a
SID Station, with some cool aliasing possible and a
fairly lo-fi filter, but nothing that can’t be found in
the many 8-bit style VST instruments around these
days.
Overall I was left wondering what exactly is the
point of this synthesiser. Yes, it is small, but in order
to get anything out of it you need to have it plugged
into a computer, map a MIDI controller to the
parameters, or use max4live or Reaktor to create a
usable front end. Seeing as the functionality of it as
a synthesiser really isn’t anything groundbreaking,
apart from the size, I would probably put the money
towards something more along the lines of a Korg
Volca.

The Ploytec Pi L Squared Synth retails for around
€99. For more information visit www.ploytec.com/
pl2