Image-Line Maxx Claster Plugins Kind of... Suck

In FL Studio you might notice that some of the plugins aren't like the others. In particluar the plugins developed by Maxx Claster (who was later brought on to the Image-Line team since Didier Dambrin was completely saturated with constant development of FL Studio itself).

This includes:

Sakura
Poizone
Toxic Biohazard
Sawer
Drumaxx / Drumpad / BassDrum
Morphine
GMS

The Bread and Butter Comparison

Obviously this is primarily just my opinion, but here's a list of many reasons why I don't like them:

The user interfaces have a completely different aesthetic from the rest of FL Studio (dare I say I find a lot of the knobs and graphics the ugliest I've used compared to any other 1st party or 3rd party VSTs), they're tiny and pixellated, and when the FL Studio DPI is bumped up past 100% (say 120% or 150%), the Maxx Claster plugins then have the bitmap graphics stretched bilinearly and it looks horrible. It's even worse on macOS as there's no filter applied so it's just a raw pixelated mess.

Those silver knobs on Sakura are so lazily done, just a silver texture with a stick drawn on.

Sytrus used to have a tiny (beautiful!) pixellated interface but it was well done and simply wouldn't be upscaled to prevent ugliness. Since it's a flagship and important plugin it was later vectorized by Miro so it's not an issue anymore.

The interfaces are sometimes unintuitive with a lot of visual bulk making it hard to decipher what's going on at an immediate glance. A good comparison for this would be Morphine versus Harmor. Harmor is capable of so much more and manages to be five times as intuitive, whereas Morphine has you flipping through a lot of menus when it's totally not necessary for how already limited it is.

Most of the features they have are all unremarkable and/or limited and/or can be replicated in any other plugin that does a better job; Sytrus and Harmor basically cover them all.

You can't click and drag the virtual keyboards to rapidly scale notes (Sawer / Poizone), it just sticks to one note. This might seem unimportant but I use this for Harmless and Harmor for making vocal effects with formant synthesis. You just get better fast jittery movements with the mouse than what you could do with an actual keyboard.

And here's an example of what I'm talking about, it's very good for sound effects, absolutely impossible to do this in Morphine or Poizone: Random Formant Talking

The artificial limitations in design make little sense when they're all software. For instance, Poizone limits what you can have on each oscillator and then places the noise as a global thing (rather than having it as a selectable waveshape ON an oscillator). The envelope generator is also extremely limited by software standards, I can do more even on most hardware!

They were built with zero regard to FL Studio's existing integrations. Why does Poizone have an inferior internal arpeggiator when FL Studio already has a much more fully developed arpeggiator that can be applied to anything??? Even worse, the integrated FL preset selector cannot hook into any of the presets since it's using its own system and Maxx never integrated it.

I suppose the argument could be made that this internal arpeggiator is used for presets, while the other one must be engaged manually. But then at that point something more elaborate should have been created in my opinion. Sytrus uses envelopes for arpeggiation and therefore you can do much more than the traditional arpeggiator options... or something like ReFX Nexus has entire custom patterns that can be built.

Redundancy: I'm not certain why so many of them were produced when they're all pretty redundant, even to one another. You could take all of the unique features and roll in Sawer, Poizone, Toxic Biohzard and Morphine... and still not have a single synthesizer that's as versatile and functional as Harmor.

Nobody really uses or discusses these plugins from what I've seen and they're not in industry standard for anything (with the exception of Sakura for whatever reason; perhaps because it's the most unique and inspired in the Maxx Claster lineup). Sytrus and Harmor on the other hand have disrupted the software synthesizer space.

The cost. They're SO expensive and SO dated and SO limited. I wouldn't own them if I didn't have the 'all plugins' edition of FL Studio. You'd have to be insane to purchase Morphine over Harmor for instance, when they cost the same. There's a million better VSTs you could buy than any of the Maxx Claster ones at their rated market price.

I get it that Sakura has a small cult following; but the people who enjoy it only seem to use it as a glorified preset machine. It has that distinct nasally metallic sound that anyone will surely pick out. At the very least you could automate some of Sakura's functions like the harmonic mask, but nobody uses it like that... because if they did, they wouldn't be using it.

Drumaxx is Bad.

When I was needing a synthetic drum machine instead of realistic drums (years ago), I bought Drummax because it was integrated in FL Studio and I thought it would be good at first, until you start to actually need to integrate it in a track.

The noise generation and (some of) the waveshaping is pretty bad; it was bad enough for a handful of others to point out on Image-Line's own forums. I believe some of the 'membrane' functionality is similar to Sakura so you get that same weird metallic timbre to it.

Switching over to Microtonic and it was pretty much a revelation; the synthesis engine runs miles past Drumaxx, you get more automation options, it's vastly superior to live switching, and of course patternarium.

Comparing the two:

Microtonic has all of the pattern articulations laid out directly underneath (acc / fill / len), Drumaxx has a completely clunky and limited layout by comparison

Microtonic has the ability for fast pattern switching (a / b / c / d / e ...), Drumaxx has listed patterns you need to numerically drag through.

Microtonic has all of the subtractive synthesis options laid out in a logical fashion, Drumaxx opts for weird nomenclatures. "Material", really?

Drumaxx has a lot of 'visual chonk' that accomplishes nothing and makes the plugin harder to navigate (similar to the issues with Morphine). Microtonic presents the interface in a logical manner that makes sense and I can immediately start using it without having to pause and decipher what's going on.

Drumaxx just doesn't sound good out of box, and it does nothing to inspire you. Microtonic on the other hand I really get into the beats and certain things start to click as it gives you suggestions (again, especially with patternarium).

Mediocrity and Nothing Else

If you spent the excess hours to try and make something good exclusively with Maxx Claster plugins (could be a fun challenge I could set up for myself some day), it's just a waste of time because there's always something infinitely better. For instance:

Sakura --> Pianoteq
Sawer / Toxic Biohazard / Poizone --> Arturia Pigments
Drumaxx --> Microtonic
Morphine --> Harmor

Not to mention, they're limited to FL Studio now instead of external VSTs, giving even less incentive for people to ever use them. It would be a tough sell to get someone from another DAW to switch exclusively to FL Studio (which already has a controversial reputation despite its success) just to use Maxx Claster plugins...

Just to be clear: I'm not a strong computer programmer and wouldn't be able to make anything like what Maxx has done in a million years, but Image-Line should probably functionally upgrade & refurbish these plugins or sell the whole Claster bundle for $50... or just make them all free.

2023-05-23