If you have ever wanted a piece of late 70s Korg polyphonic weirdness without tracking down a rare and very expensive vintage synth, FB-3200 by Full Bucket Music is a great free grab.
The original Korg PS-3200 came out in 1978, and it was a beast for its time: a semi-modular polyphonic synthesizer with 48 notes of polyphony, two oscillators per voice, and a patch panel that let you reroute things in ways most polysynths of the era just did not do. It also had 16 programmable memories, which was a big deal back then.
FB-3200 aims to recreate the behavior and all the controls of that hardware, and it gets the important stuff right. You get band-limited oscillators, the classic Korg lowpass filter (switchable between the original two-pole Korg 35 style and a four-pole ladder type), an equalizer section, two modulation generators, sample and hold, and a paraphonic envelope generator. It is semi-modular, so you can patch things around and get into properly strange territory, and Full Bucket added some welcome modern touches: velocity response, micro-tuning, resonators, and MIDI learn on every parameter. It is written in native C++ too, so it runs light on CPU.
It is a lovely synth for big warm pads, drifting strings, and odd evolving textures, the kind of sounds that sit beautifully under industrial and electronic tracks. Load up a preset, pull the cutoff down a bit, add a little delay or reverb from your DAW, and you are most of the way there.
Get it here, free with no signup or activation needed:
https://www.fullbucket.de/music/fb3200.html
Look for the Windows ZIP and Mac PKG download links on that page.
How to install (Windows):
- Download and unzip the Windows ZIP file.
- Copy the fb3200.vst3 file (or the .dll if you use VST2) into your VST plugins folder.
- Rescan plugins in your DAW and load FB-3200 on an instrument track.
How to install (Mac):
- Download the Mac PKG file.
- Right-click or control-click the PKG in Finder and choose Open, since it comes from an unidentified developer, then follow the installer steps.
- Rescan plugins in your DAW and load FB-3200 as a VST, VST3, or AU instrument.
Note: FB-3200 is available for Windows and Mac in VST2, VST3, AU, CLAP, and AAX formats. There is no Linux version, and it does not need any original ROM file or extra downloads.
Here is what it sounds like in action:
If you like vintage Korg tone but your budget says free, this one is a no-brainer. Grab it, play with the patch panel, and see what weird and wonderful sounds fall out.