Product Reviews by KVR Members

This synth is pretty much what it says it is - g-r-eat. It is a straightforward 2 osc V/A synth with the usual features - four different waveforms, PWM and the usual cross-modulation functionality. It has six effects - delay, reverb, phaser, chorus, EQ and distortion - that are all very usable and do what you'd expect without setting the world on fire. Global controls, like voice modes and portamento/glide, are easy to find. There is also a basic arp.

The GUI graphics are really good and everything is laid out really well, which makes it very quick and easy to work with. Usability is one of GR-8's real strengths.

There aren't a huge number of presets but they show the capabilities of the synth quite well. There is a patch browser and preset management is good - not overly fancy/fussy, it's straightforward and easy to use.

CPU use was initially on the high side but this was addressed in an update. The sound quality is excellent and easily justifies the CPU use. This is a synth that has a full, thick sound with a modern character all its own. It's not trying to sound like anything else, it just sounds good. This sound quality is up to the standard of synths in the $100-$200 price range. For free.

GR-8 is not just good for the price, it's actually a good synth and well worth checking out. For me it is the pick of this year's Dev Challenge crop.

EDIT May 2023: Two years on and GR8 remains one of my go-to synths. I still find uses for it all the time and whenever I think to load it up, it always gives me what I'm after.

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.

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.

Babylon is a strange mix. It is quite a capable synth with most of the controls on a single page. It sounds pretty good, too, but somehow it fails to inspire. I think a lot of the problem is with the massive load of presets it ships with. Looking at their names and hearing how little variation there seems to be going from one to the next, you get the feeling they were made by some automated process that went through and moved one parameter by a fixed amount and then saved that as the next preset. Even the Demo bank, which tries to show a broader range of sounds, has too many soft sinewave based patches that could be anything. But if you listen to different presets randomly, you start to get a better idea of what Babylon can do.

It's a 3 osc synth with per-osc unison, so it can sound massive. You can cross-modulate Osc 1 and 2 with Osc 3 for FM, Ring and Amplitude mod effects. If Osc 3 isn't being used and you switch on one of the cross-mod modes, it turns green (instead of blue) so you know it's in use but not making any sound. It's a nice touch. Another nice visual touch is the display to show you how the unison voices are being allocated. It's something that's tricky to visualise but the display shows you where/how unison voices are being added. You also get a subtle glow in the highlight areas of the GUI when your levels peak, which is kinda cool (can be turned down or off if you don't like it).

The filter is a mixed bag. You get 5 different filter types - Low Pass, Band Pass, High Pass, Notch and Peak. The Peak filter is something a bit different and much more usable than I expected it to be. For both the Notch and Peak filters, the Resonance knob controls the Q. The filter also includes an effect knob and you can choose from various forms of distortion/saturation/bit reduction to give the filter some extra character/bite. It works very well. Where the filter falls down is that the modulation depth of the dedicated filter ADSR envelope is not enough to completely open the filter. The Env Mod at 100 (maximum) only opens the filter to about the same level as turning the cutoff to 30. Adding one of the Mod Envelopes to Cutoff in the Mod Matrix doesn't help as the combined values seem to be multiplied (in the range -1 to +1), not added. The filter visualisation is static, it would be nice to see it move with the modulation applied to it.

As well as dedicated filter and amp envelopes, there are two LFO and two Mod Envelopes to use in the 8 slot Mod Matrix. The problem is that, like the Filter Env, they all lack modulation depth, which severely hampers the synth overall. It's a real shame because it would be an easy fix and it would make the synth way more useful. If the dev could fix this problem, Babylon would be a really good synth to have for all kinds of situations. As it is, for everything that you might like about it, you are bound to find something that's a bit of a disappointment. For the $9 I paid for it, I am happy enough but I can't see the value in it at full price, I'm afraid.

FireCobra is, quite simply, brilliant. Place it in the Master channel and it opens up your mixes so you can hear every part clearly. It brightens the whole thing and gives a professional "sheen" to a mix in a minute or two that you might otherwise spend hours trying to achieve. Adding it to a single channel is a little hit and miss - sometimes it makes a huge difference, sometimes it doesn't do much at all, depending on the source.

There are basically only 3 control knobs, plus a dry/wet balance, and you get a dozen or so presets. But there is a lot going on under the uber-cool interface. Try a preset or just tweak it from the INIT patch yourself. Either way, you'll get an amazing result almost instantly. There are a couple of selector switches but you only need to use those if you are having problems. I've been using it for a couple of months now and haven't had to bother. You also get input and output gain sliders so you can gain match to the untreated signal, just to make sure it's actually better, not just louder. The three main controls are INTENSIFY, which does most of the magic via some machine intelligence algorithm. The other two are SMACK and ANALOGIZE, which both add extra harmonic content to fatten up the sound. Analogize is a lot more subtle than Smack, so I tend to use it on mixes, where I use Smack a lot more on synths and drum parts.

I find that the better the mix, the less pronounced FireCobra's effect is, which is cool because you can throw it on a problematic mix and it might solve your problems for you. It certainly saves me from spending too long polishing up mixes for our live sets. I just get it close and let FireCobra do it's magic. And sometimes it really does feel like magic.

Yes, it's expensive and, yes, I got it when it was on sale but, honestly, if someone showed it to me and I heard exactly what it's capable of, I think I would be happy to pay full price. It is easily the best plugin I have ever put on my master channel and what it does is absolutely worth what they are charging.

Mono/Fury is my kind of synth - straightforward, easy to use and with a great sound. I bought a brand new Mono/Poly in 1982, but I cant remember exactly what it sounded like, so I have no idea how accurate this is as an emulation and, frankly, I don't care. What matters to me is that it sounds fantastic and it is very easy to get the best from it with minimal effort. It also uses practically no CPU at all, as in the CPU meter reads 0% most the time when I am using it and I've never seen it go over 2%.

For those unfamiliar with the Mono/Poly, it has four VCOs that you can use to play separately, giving you four voices of polyphony (although there is still only one filter) or you can stack them for a fat unison sound (monophonic). Hence Mono/Poly. In it's day it was one of the best synths money could buy, easily able to compete with things like ARP's Odyssey or the MiniMoog and better than the instruments being produced by it's Japanese competitors. It had a section devoted to oscillator cross-modulation which, combined with the characterful filter, gave the Mono/Poly a lot of versatility and a very aggressive sound if you wanted it.

Mono/Fury definitely captures the aggression of the original. Dial in a bit of X-MOD and/or FM and use the Filter Envelope to modulate everything and off you go. Turn up the resonance for even more nastiness. It goes further than a lot of synths are capable of without adding distortion somewhere in the signal path. You might think it would sound a bit weak or hollow in Poly mode but you'd be wrong. The oscillators have a big sound and hold their own in a mix.

The sound is brilliant but it's the usability of Mono/Fury that really makes it great. Unlike Korg's own VSTi version, Mono/Fury has a simple layout. There are more controls if you need them, accessed via the little icon in the lower left corner, but they are hidden by default, leaving you with just the controls for the synth engine itself. It's a stroke of genius that makes Mono/Fury so much easier to work with than Korg's emulation. The resizable GUI itself is also nicer than Korg's, even their revamped versions.

Mono/Fury holds it's own against the best emulations out there. If it was $99 it would sell really well, I reckon, and maybe it would be taken more seriously, too. Make no mistake, it is a great synth that just happens to also be donationware. If you don't give the developer some money for such an amazing plug-in, you're basically stealing. (For the record, I donated 30 Euros for this and I intend to make similar donations for any of his other synths I decide to keep.) Mono/Fury is my new go-to synth. Give it a go and you might find it becomes yours, too.

P.S. If you want a good companion synth to go with Mono/Fury, I'd recommend you check out Nabla, FBM's Korg Delta emulation. It's a polysynth with a very different feature set but still with the great Korg sound from that era. They go together really well.

I think this sounds too good to be a close emulation of a Poly800, which never sounded good at all. The problem with it is that they have slavishly copied the original's UI and it really doesn't work here. You can't see the value of anything until you hover your cursor over it and there is simply not enough contrast between the background and the markings to comfortably read any of the parameters. Overall, the GUI is way too large, too, even at it's minimum scaling.

Overall it's an interesting exercise in showing why slavish emulations of old hardware is a bad idea. Some of FBM's other synths are absolute crackers, like Mono/Fury, but this one is way wide of the mark, I'm afraid. Some years ago Synapse made another Poly800 clone and I think they did a better job than FBM have done here. If you can find a copy of that for sale somewhere, it's a better bet, I reckon.

POSITIVES.

- Sounds nice enough, better than I remember a Poly800 ever sounding.

- Can't argue with the price.

NEGATIVES.

- GUI too big at minimum size.

- Slavish copying of original UI hampers usability.

- FBM have much better synths than this one.

BM Vice is a drum plugin of considerable talent that would make a capable replacement for the likes of Battery or Groove Agent for those who don't want to spend hours sorting out their drums. Like the other instrument's in Ujam's Beatmaker series, Vice offers instant gratification with enough depth to allow you to tweak everything into something that is uniquely yours.

The basic workflow is that you pick a top level preset, find the right pattern and trigger it from your sequencer. Like all of Ujam's instruments, the pattern buttons are arranged in a keyboard-like fashion so it is obvious which key you need to use to trigger a pattern. It is super-quick and easy to establish a great sounding beat for you to work from.

Patterns are arranged in preset groups. Within each group you get a couple of intros, a few verse patterns, some chorus patterns, a few fills and a couple of outtros, all spread over two octaves of keys. All up, I think there are more than 1000 patterns. Similarly, there are several different kits to choose from. Each kit has two different kick samples, two snares and various other percussion sounds. Lastly there are effects, again organised into a bunch of presets. Each top level preset, then, consists of a kit, a pattern group and an effects preset and there is plenty contained within those top- level presets to get you going. But it doesn't have to stop there...

There are several levels at which you can customise BM Vice to get your own, unique sound. First up, there are four macro sliders. On the left side you can alter the balance between the kick and snare and how much the kick pumps (compression) and on the right side there are sliders for the effects mix and intensity. You can also select a different kit, a different group of patterns and a different effect preset.

At the next level down you have individual control of volume, decay, pitch and a low-pass filter for each individual drum sample. You can also swap sounds between kits to create your own custom kit, but only like for like. e.g. You can swap Kick 1 in one kit for any kick in another kit but you can't swap a kick for a snare. You can also select either a single output or multi-out (a separate mixer channel for each sample). On the opposite side of the GUI you can adjust four parameters in whichever effects preset you are currently using.

The last level of customisation allows you to add extra hits to existing patterns, using your host's sequencer. The two octaves below the pattern octaves allow you to trigger individual drum hits, which means you can change the preset patterns easily, or create your own from scratch, so that every part of the patch is uniquely yours. You can also drag 'n' drop any preset pattern into your sequencer to create MIDI from it.

OK, all of that applies to every Beatmaker plugin, what's different in BM Vice? It's the style - BM Vice is all about the 80s and is full of drum sounds from classic 80s drum machines like the LINN Drum. Of course, it wouldn't be the 80s without those classic Simmons drum sounds and massive reverb, both of which are present and correct in BM Vice, the former via a kit and the latter through one of the effects presets. The patterns are also geared towards 80s synthwave type music, although I have found them to be much more versatile than that. Like its siblings, the bests thump and everything sounds great, right out of the box.

What makes all the Beatmaker plugins so good is that you can put in as much or as little effort as you like, yet you will always get great sounding drums. That means you can start off with a preset and refine your drums as your project progresses, until the finished product is uniquely yours, not just a preset 500 other people are also using. For $69 they are all crazy good value.

BM Eden v2 has several enhancements over the original that broaden its usefulness and appeal considerably, making it a far more capable replacement for the likes of Battery or Groove Agent for those who don't want to spend hours sorting out their drums. Like the other instrument's in Ujam's Beatmaker series, Eden offers instant gratification with enough depth to allow you to tweak everything into something that is uniquely yours.

The basic workflow is that you pick a top level preset, find the right pattern and trigger it from your sequencer. Like all of Ujam's instruments, the pattern buttons are arranged in a keyboard-like fashion so it is obvious which key you need to use to trigger a pattern. It is super-quick and easy to establish a great sounding beat for you to work from.

Patterns are arranged in preset groups. Within each group you get a couple of intros, a few verse patterns, some chorus patterns, a few fills and a couple of outtros, all spread over two octaves of keys. All up, I think there are more than 1000 patterns. Similarly, there are several different kits to choose from. Each kit has two different kick samples, two snares and various other percussion sounds. Lastly there are effects, again organised into a bunch of presets. Each top level preset, then, consists of a kit, a pattern group and an effects preset and there is plenty contained within those top- level presets to get you going. But it doesn't have to stop there...

There are several levels at which you can customise Eden to get your own, unique sound. First up, there are four macro sliders. On the left side you can alter the balance between the kick and snare and how much the kick pumps (compression) and on the right side there are sliders for the effects mix and intensity. You can also select a different kit, a different group of patterns and a different effect preset.

At the next level down you have individual control of volume, decay, pitch and a low-pass filter for each individual drum sample. You can also swap sounds between kits to create your own custom kit, but only like for like. e.g. You can swap Kick 1 in one kit for any kick in another kit but you can't swap a kick for a snare. You can also select either a single output or multi-out (a separate mixer channel for each sample). On the opposite side of the GUI you can adjust four parameters in whichever effects preset you are currently using.

The last level of customisation allows you to add extra hits to existing patterns, using your host's sequencer. The two octaves below the pattern octaves allow you to trigger individual drum hits, which means you can change the preset patterns easily, or create your own from scratch, so that every part of the patch is uniquely yours. You can also drag 'n' drop any preset pattern into your sequencer to create MIDI from it.

OK, all of that applies to all the Beatmaker plugins, what is different about Eden is that it's drums and patterns are designed for trance and other 4-on-the-floor dance styles so you get huge kicks, tight snares and lots of useful percussion elements. No matter what your musical style, you are bound to find a top level preset that will make the perfect starting point.

What makes all the Beatmaker plugins so good is that you can put in as much or as little effort as you like, yet you will always get great sounding drums. That means you can start off with a preset and refine your drums as your project progresses, until the finished product is uniquely yours, not just a preset 500 other people are also using. For $69 they are all crazy good value. I already have 3 out of 5 of these plugins and I'll probably end up with al of them.

Let me start by saying I am a big fan of Kilohearts. They make great, innovative products and they are a fantastic company to deal with, which makes it easy to give Phase Plant a solid recommendation. The method of product delivery and update is terrific and makes normally tedious admin easy. When Phase Plant was released I already had a handful of Snap-Ins and their synth plugin, kHs One, so I was confident it would be a decent synth. At first the price was higher than I was willing to contemplate so I didn't download the demo until they had a half-price sale last year. It took me about two minutes with the trial version to decide to spend the money.

I thought Phase Plant (PP) would be good to use in a more stripped back state, with just the minimum number of modules to deal with. My plan was to make a few different set-ups as presets - e.g. a 2 Osc V/A synth, a simple wavetable synth, etc. - almost like a Reaktor type set-up, and then patch those preset layouts as needed in my production work. You can definitely do that and get good results but what I discovered is that you get even better results from more complex set-ups and that PP's architecture makes it really easy to experiment with lots of different things, like placing distortion before the filter or between the oscillators and stuff like that. It's quick and easy and I find it very inspiring.

I started with just the basic set-up, plus the Snap-ins I already had and that was plenty, especially as you still get access to all the other Snap-Ins via the presets. So, for example, if you want to use a particular effect you don't own, just find a preset that uses it and construct your own layout around that. It sounds like cheating but, trust me, doing that makes you earn the privilege and you'll only do it once or twice before you realise it's just easier to buy the Snap-Ins you like and use. Since buying PP I have also bought another 3 or 4 Snap-Ins at full price and an extra 6-8 when they have been on sale for 50% off. I intend to buy everything that goes on sale for half-price until I have them all.

Sound quality is first-rate, no matter which oscillators you use. PP has a crisp high-end and a nicely balanced bottom end, which makes it very easy to work into a mix. Feature-wise, there are literally a million options but one area where I do find it comparatively lacking is in the filter department. A recent update added more modes but they all lack much character. They do the job well enough and you can coax more out of them with some effects but it would be great to see a few more options, especially some modelled filters with different character.

Modulation is easy with drag'n'drop, colour-coded so you can see what is modulation (blue) and what is an audio path (orange). The three separate effects lanes give you lots of flexibility with your signal routing, allowing you to have three separate synths in one or one synth with three times the power. The preset browser is pretty good and there are some excellent presets to fire your creativity. Saving your own presets is a breeze and they get saved into a separate User folder, making them easy to find again.

Overall, Phase Plant can be quite daunting and getting the most out of it can be a lengthy process. But the shear depth of ability and breadth of options available to you make it well worth the time and effort. If I wasn't such a cheap-skate I'd have known this a year earlier and been on board from the start, because it is definitely worth paying full price for. Now that I have a decent library of my own patches, it is one of the first synths I think of whenever I need a new part or want to replace an existing part that isn't working as well as I'd like. It is so capable it can do pretty much anything.