JP6K

What an amazing synth! Incredible sound quality and so easy to get great sounds from, this VSTi should be in every Windows users' plugin folder. I have no idea, and even less interest in how good an emulation of the JP8000 it is but I'd be surprised if the Roland hardware had a filter half as good as this one. It's a peach.

You get two SuperSaw oscillators for all that 90s trance goodness, if that's your thing, and the most sublime string pads, which is more my thing, plus a Noise generator. The rich tones of the low-pass resonant filter remind me very much of the excellent Wasp synth that comes built into Synapse Audio's Orion virtual studio, a sound we have struggled to match since moving from Orion a few years ago. Until now. The combination of the Supersaw oscillators and lush resonance allows you to create the fattest basses imaginable.

At first the synth seems a little bare-bones but there is a little button called "MORE", curiously placed in the filter section on the GUI, that opens up a number of extra options, like velocity modulation of filter and amp, as well as an AD envelope for pitch mod, Glide control, oscillator Pan control and an Analog knob, which adds a slight random variation to the pitch of each note to make it sound a bit more like an analogue synth. There are also two effects - a simple EQ and a basic delay, both of which are adequate to the task.

I like the GUI and it is resizable, so you can make it as big or small as you like. The "LED" display shows you parameter values as you move controls and clicking on it displays the preset list. Preset management is very basic, about the same as DUNE, but works well enough. CPU usage is very low for sound quality like this.

I bought this synth last month and it has very quickly become my go-to synth for strings and basslines. It features heavily in the last half-a-dozen projects I've been working on, with multiple instances in several of them, and I can see myself adding it to a lot of older projects, too, wherever I had previously tried to replace a Wasp bassline and probably for a lot of string parts, too. It's quick and easy to patch from scratch and the results are always usable. JP6K is the synth I've been looking for for the last 10 years - great sound with just enough features to make it usable across a number of styles. What's really stupid about it is that for 9 of those 10 years I could have had it, if only I'd known it existed. At 25 Euros, this should be in everyone's synth arsenal.