#vst

FM synths have always had the same problem. Everybody loves the sound and nobody wants to program the thing, so most of the FM you have ever heard was a factory preset nobody dared to touch. Audio Damage

606 Koncept: Free Roland TR-606 Drum Machine for Your DAW If you love that dry, snappy, early 80s drum machine sound, here is a free one worth grabbing. 606 Koncept by SampleScience is a tribute to the

Here is a wild one for the sampler heads. The Ensoniq EPS-16 Plus came out in 1991 and it was the sampler a whole generation of hip hop and electronic producers cut their teeth on. 16-bit sampling, a gritty

A brand new wavetable synth landed yesterday and I have been poking at it all morning. CERNION comes from quietformat, a new name to me, and it is the kind of instrument that rewards you for getting your

Here is a fun one. Back in the early 80s you could walk into a Radio Shack and walk out with a real Moog synth. The Realistic MG-1, also sold as the Concertmate MG-1, was built by Moog Music and sold through

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

Tonight is a synth night, and this one is a proper 80s classic. PG-8X by Martin Lüders is a free emulation of the Roland JX-8P, the 6 voice analog polysynth from 1985 that ended up on countless synth pop

There is a special place in my heart for synths that sound wrong in the right way, and remaincalm just shipped one. Sunfish came out on November 1, and it is what you get when a bunch of half-dead home

Tonight is a drum machine night, and this one is a proper little analog style box. Apollon by Synsonic Instruments is a free virtual analog drum machine with a built in step sequencer, and it used to cost

GForce just dropped the one I have been waiting for since they started doing Oberheim. The Matrix-12 is out, and this is the only official software version of the 1985 monster, built with Oberheim and

Quick heads up before anything else: SCC is not a sampler you load samples into. It is an effect plugin. You drop it on a drum bus, a break or a sample and it colours the sound with the grit of the old

So the guy behind Renoise just launched his own plugin company, and the first thing out of the door is genuinely weird in the best way. The Swarm is a wavetable synth where every note spawns a flock of

Quick heads up before anything else: OB-Xd is a free download, but only for non-commercial use. If you want to use it on commercial tracks, the registration is $99, and that also unlocks 2x and 4x

If you have ever been nostalgic for Synth1, this one is for you. François Chabloz just released Oxo Synth2, a free open source revival of Daichi Laboratory's classic freeware synth, rebuilt for modern

This one is a bit special. Most free emulations recreate a synth from scratch, guessing at how it sounded. This one does not guess at all. The MS2000R Emulator runs the actual code from the real machine,

I have been on a bit of a spectral kick lately and 4Pockets just dropped something that scratches that itch in a really friendly way. SpectraPad does not start with a sawtooth or a square wave. It starts

If you love cheap, weird, gloriously lo-fi 80s polysynths, this one is a treat. Fury-800 from Full Bucket Music is a free software synth that recreates the Korg Poly-800 from 1983. The real Poly-800 was

Today's find is a drum machine, and I will say that up front so nobody goes in expecting a melodic synth. VD-1 from vdsp-audio is a lo-fi drum machine built around a simulated fixed-point DSP chip, and

If you love big, lush, slightly weird 70s polyphonic sounds, this one is a treat. FB-3100 from Full Bucket Music is a free software synth that recreates the Korg PS-3100 polyphonic synthesizer from 1977.