Free prog vsti recommendations?

The ones I use most often are Monolisa for leads, Sytrus for leads, pads, & various keys, Tapeworm for mellotron-type sounds, Samsara FabBass for bass (obviously).

Blamsoft VK-1 completely blows MiniMogueVA out of water. It's IMHO the best free minimoog emulation out there.

Trouble with a lot of free VSTs is that they're all pretty much based on the same engine. 

Thanks for all the tips!

Slightly off-topic but you might come up with something interesting by playing around with something like Pure Data or SuperCollider.

why dont you use like, real instruments

Cboi Sandlin wrote: why dont you use like, real instruments

Edited by ExittheLemming - October 14 2021 at 09:23

The reason why two Moogs didn't sound the same was that tolerance of electronic parts was very wide back in the 60's and early 70's. I've seen resistors and capacitors from that time which were much as 20% out. Theoretically, you'd put a trim potentiometer in to make sure you got a correct voltage at one point, but they're actually not there in the older Moog designs. 

Plus, since all the PCBs were hand etched - you draw a circuit on the board using a pen and then acid etch the copper layer off - all the boards are different resistances as well. There's 1001 reasons why two hand built synths don't sound similar and whilst the Moogs are a very simple design, each one is different. 

The "Moog sound" relies on a transistor ladder filter which introduces distortion as the signal passes through several stages of transistor and capacitor filter stages. Because there are two transistors per stage of the ladder, each had to be performance matched (which is a black art in itself) . With modern transistors, you can bet performance is within the required parameters, but if you get hold of System 55 (etc) then you've got a filter which is now nearly 60 years old. So it'll have some degree of degradation in it somewhere. 

As Moog got more established, they produced much more complicated modules like the Bode filter and vocoder, which is basically a many stage filter. So, whilst they're made of slightly better stuff, they're much more complicated electronically and therefore with more individual variation. 

Etc etc etc. If anyone tells me you can replicate this in software - and my job is in software - then they're just *wrong*. You might be able to approximate it, but "approximate" is a very broad term. 

Put it like this. If a VST Arturia Moog Modular and MIDI keyboard sounded exactly like a 60's Moog Modular, they'd be selling it for much more. 

So how were those two posts connected ?

The specific ambient temperature of a venue has no effect on oscillator drift, so long as it's kept constant. Which is why they contain tempco resistors as adjusters. 

And "the next round of digital synths" sounded pretty much like their analogue forbears. If you were, say, Helen Keller. 




Edited by Davesax1965 - October 18 2021 at 09:35