Cyclone - Vintage Sampler Emulator

This plugin "saved" me from buying a vintage sampler and/or from buying 112dB's Morgana. It's a 1:1 copy of the original device with Typhoon OS (the gentlemen behind Sonic Charge developed "Typhoon", an alternative OS for Yamaha's TX16W sampler, back then), including all the chips inside the TX16W so the overall sound and artifacts from transposing are pretty much the same as if you had the device in front of you. Heavy aliasing when sampling on low sample rates is where Cyclone excels if that's your cup of tea.

If you are looking for that gritty vintage sampler sound and have tried the numerous bitcrushers - look no further, this is the one you should be getting unless you're after the sound of an MPC60, an SP1200 or any other specific vintage sampler sound (for the Ensoniq Mirage, get the aforementioned Morgana). This one does the 12bits Yamaha thing and it does it very well.

Cyclone can sample via sidechain inputs which makes it easy to set up in Logic. Sampling will turn into the thing it used to be with happy accidents by pressing "Go" too late or too early. Alternative trigger procedures are available though I haven't tested them.

Editing is far from today's standards, of course, but I find the method with using digits and your ears way more intuitive for special tasks such as sampling old records. This is not a replacement for the EXS24 or Kontakt, it's rather a digital time machine that takes you back straight to the late 1980ies/early 1990ies, although setting up keymaps/multisamples is possible (but a pain in the arse to be honest).

I am using Cyclone for sampling old records, drum hits, vocal snips and chord stabs or percussion loops to add that ringing aliasing patina to a few samples.

The plugin is actually free but I would have paid 90€ for something like this. I haven't used Sonic Charge's support but from reading in their forums, I'd assume that these swedish guys are quite nice and helpful should you run into any trouble.

Is it worth to go through the trouble of learning how to use this vintage emulation? I'd say yes if you want to aquire some perfect sounding vintage synth sounds which you probabely have heart a 1000 times in popular songs.

Since the whole emulation is really like the original machine it's a time consuming undertaking to load and evaluate the sounds. But the nice thing is (which I have'nt done yet), you can save your selections as .fxb so you can get fast access to your favorite sounds.

There are a lot of TX16W sounds on the net. they need to be converted to image files. This can be done with a online app Sonic Charge has on their website.

Great work Magnus Lidström.