After several years in the making, I'm pleased to announce the next major iteration of Charlatan, the free Virtual Analog synth!
Charlatan³ has been redesigned from the ground up in order to better meet the needs of today's productions. Besides the new powerful synthesis engine, the completely revamped user interface offers an ultra-fast workflow and encourages a creative sound design process much like what the original synth is known for.
Feature summary
- Two dual oscillators per voice with custom drawable waveforms, cross-modulation (Phase Mod, linear Frequency Mod, Ring Mod), windowed hard sync and noise generator
- Up to 7 unison voices per oscillator
- Two filters per voice with types: 4-pole ladder LP/HP/BP, Acid LP, 2-pole Sallen-Key LP/HP/BP, Notch and Comb
- Flexible filter routing (serial / parallel / dual)
- Four modulation generators with freely drawable shape where each can operate either as LFO or envelope generator
- Four Modulation transformers (XFORM) allow reshaping any control signal through a user-defined mapping
- Arbitrary routing of modulation signals via Drag'n'Drop
- High-quality master FX section: Distortion, Phaser, Chorus, Reverb, Delay, EQ
- Very low CPU and RAM usage
- Optional internal 2x oversampling
- Preset browser
- Cross-platform support: Windows / Linux / VST3 / CLAP
- FREEWARE
FAQ
- Will there be a Mac version?
No plans currently. From what I gathered over the years, supporting the Apple platform is a time-consuming commitment which I can't really justify for a spare-time project. Instead, I'd rather support open platforms like Linux, in the hope to help them gain adoption.
- Is there no way to do pulse-width modulation (PWM) ?
You can achieve it by mixing two sawtooth waves with 180 degrees phase offset relative to each other, one of them inverted, then modulating the phase of either using an LFO. See attached preset for your convenience.
Note that this is neither a hack nor workaround, but just an explicit realization of how PWM is implemented in most other synths under the hood (both software and hardware).
- Will it load patches from Charlatan 2.0?
Not at this point. While being much more capable overall, Charlatan³'s architecture differs from that of its predecessor in ways that it could not reproduce every preset accurately. One could consider an import option in a best-effort fashion, without any guarantee to achieve identical results. However, I'm not sure whether it's worth the effort, given that the former architecture is so simple that you can basically dial in every patch within seconds.
- The plug-in does not load / is blacklisted by my DAW
Please make sure that your system meets the systen requirements listed above
- Where are the presets located on my hard drive?
The easiest way to find out is to open the preset browsers menu and click "Open file browser".
