Rasmus Nyåker over at Unusable Engineering just dropped a new one today, and it might be my favorite kind of synth: the kind that sounds like it fell out of a timeline where the DX7 never happened and everybody just kept refining analog instead.
Currents & Nostalgia is a six voice virtual analog synth built around two circuit modelled saw core oscillators. These are not generic VA oscs. Rasmus modelled the actual saw core circuit from one of his hardware projects, component tolerances and all, and there is a Core Drift control that lets you dial in how much of that wobble and variation you want. The two oscillators feed a waveform mixer that can push the filters into saturation, and the mixer has ring mod, folded sum, min/max tricks and noise tucked in there too.
The real fun is the slot systems. There are two of them, one for the oscillators and mixer and one for the filters, and each one holds eight complete sets of settings. You can step or sweep between them, run them at different speeds, even push them into audio rates, and lock individual parameters so they stay put while everything else moves. It is the kind of thing that turns a plain pad into something that keeps shifting under your hands, which is exactly what I want for industrial textures. A static sound gets boring fast. This one does not sit still.
Filters are a resonant ladder low pass that can self oscillate, with a slope you can move from 12 to 36 dB per octave, plus a state variable high pass, and you can run them in series, parallel, or a mix of both. There is MPE support, MTS-ESP for alternative tunings, and 350 factory presets that Rasmus says he worked through properly this time instead of just filling a bank. No demo version, but there is a 30 day refund policy, and the plugins do not phone home or need a plugin manager, which I appreciate.
Rasmus also put up a full walkthrough on YouTube if you want to hear it before you buy:
Price: 89 euros including Danish VAT. There is also a UNUSABLE10 voucher floating around that knocks 10 euros off until November 26, so 79 if you grab it in time. Grab it here: https://www.unusable.net/synthesizers/currents-and-nostalgia/