Diodow
Tranzistow
Brings me back to my DOS days.
But there is nothing DOS about what you can do with these things. Diodow is not too difficult to work with as it's relatively "small" though still quite capable. It's great for sci fi stuff as the LFOs are quite unusual. I've never run into anything like them.
Tranzistow is a lot more complex and, quite honestly, because of the demo restrictions, I haven't done much with it.
The bad news is, while Diodow is a free download, there is no way to get the full version of Tranzistow outside of something that I don't want to mention here because I'm not sure if the dev wants the information shared publicly. If you want to know the details, download the PDF.
When I get some time, I'll create some demos and upload them to Soundcloud. While these synths are best at weird stuff, they can do bread and butter sounds as well. But honestly, IMO, that's just a waste of their potential. There are plenty of other synths for bread and butter.
In the meantime, I'm having a blast playing with Diodow. I'm putting together a West Coast style library for it that I'll eventually make available free as the synth itself is free.
Surprisingly, I have only found 1 bug on my system. If you pull the VST up and don't init a patch, it seems if you try to save anything that you create, the save button doesn't seem to work. After you do the init, then it works. Of course this may be just specific to my PC.
The sound itself is solid. The main sound source is a sawtooth wave but you can turn it into a square or pulse via a number of parameters. There are a few low pass filters, a high pass, band and notch filter. It appears to be a bare bones synth as far as sound sources, but there are so many modulation parameters that you can get a wide variety of sounds out of this thing.
The DOS-like interface is probably going to put a lot of people off from programming this thing, which is a shame, but if you grew up during the era, the controls might not bug you too much. For me, it's a refreshing change from all the modern glitz that we get today.
I've programmed a couple of Tranzistow patches and a little over 30 Diodow patches. The demo version of Tranzistow only allows 1 of the 4 parts to be programmed, which is disappointing. But like I said, there is a way to get the full version if you're up to it. That's all I'll say on that subject.
Anyway, I'm having a blast with these synths that had all of one thread here at KVR in 2013 and that was it. Understandable as the main synth is not commercially available.
Maybe if there was enough interest the dev would reconsider.
Either way, if you want to play with something that's truly unique, download Diodow and the demo version of Tranzistow.
Sound demos to come.
