Invader 2

This is my kind of synth - relatively simple, very easy to use and with a great sound. As you can see, the interface is clean, clear and uncluttered. It basically has everything right there on the front panel. The only exception is the filter section, where you have a choice of Filter 1 or Filter 2, each of which has its own controls. So you see the one you're using, not the one you aren't. It's a joy to program because it's all right there, at your fingertips. Patch selection is a breeze and, crucially, saving your own patches is a doddle.

The synth itself is a classic V/A with two oscillators, plus a sub-oscillator, a low pass filter - two types to choose from - and pairs of LFO's and ADSR envelopes. The mixer section allows you to add in noise and ring modulation and this is also where you set the overall volume of the patch. The oscillators have the usual range of V/A waveforms plus a "Sync" oscillator mode which does wonderfully good hard sync without any effort. Next to the mixer are Unison controls that include proper unison modes, that clone the oscillators, as well as "emulated" unison that uses a DSP cheat to save on CPU. The "6*8" unison mode combines 6 voices of real unison with 8 emulated voices for a really big sound. CPU use, generally, is very good for this quality of sound. There is an HQ mode but turning it off doesn't really make anything sound worse, nor does it save you much CPU.

As mentioned, there are two different low-pass filters to choose from. Both sound basically similar but one has a separate high-pass filter with a single control (cutoff) and the other has a drive circuit that adds nice saturation to the sound (which is my favourite).

For modulation, you get two ADSR envelopes, each with a velocity slider, plus two LFOs with delay. Adding modulation is really straightforward - each section has modulation sliders and all you have to do is select a source and set a level. It's great because you can see what modulation has been applied right in the section you are looking at.

The presets are mostly very usable. There are a few slightly weird ones but most of them can go straight into your projects if you want. But with something that is so easy to patch, you'll probably end up making your own sounds from scratch. It is so easy to get great sounding patches from Invader that it's just not funny. It seems to have so many sweet spots that it's easy to fill up a folder with great sounds in a single evening.

Overall this is a very slick package that combines the two major things I look for in a VSTi - great sound quality and ease-of-use. The GUI looks fantastic and works even better (three different UI sizes are available). Everybody needs to download the demo and try this out for themselves. It is well worth the effort. I love it so much I bought it twice.