Krakli

The year 2025 here if you found this than Great.

As I have worked with VST's and hardware I find this synth very able to complete with the new generation it gives that finesse we want out of hardware and dream of it of VST's that sell for bucks if u can get it, , , get it.

Nice little free vsti. only 32-bits, and it's old now but ...

I use it in a few tracks. the sound is ok.

krakliplugins.co.uk is a factory for free excellent synth .

I use them a lot in my space opera tracks. It's perfect for create strange and cool sound.

A must have for all the fan of the genre .

Very cool free synth.

For creating nice atmosphere (in my case, some tracks relative to space), it's perfect .

The presets are cool, too bad it's only 32-bits.

krakliplugins.co.uk is an excellent cool synth producer :).

This synth attempts and succeeds to break new ground in sound. To be honest I haven't heard anything that sounds exactly like it, it has a unique flavor to it.

But mostly, it is packaged as a String-modelling synth, and its shiny user-interface is based on the wood you see in violins and cellos. For those looking for a realistic Orchestral VST for their studio, I must warn you, this synth gets close but does not sound exactly like your standard bowed string instruments. However, the sounds it creates are unique, rich and believable at times, subdued or leading, and it is definitely worth opening up and trying it out. When you consider how complex it must be to try and model a bowed string sound using a program, you can see that a lot of hard work went into this, and the result is quality.

This synth has character of its own and makes bowed instruments sounds that don’t exist in real life yet are close to realistic and it will find a place in your projects if you let it.

Something about this instrument that might be a pro or a con depending on how you look at it, is that on the user interface there is a keyboard with a line going across it that apparently allows you to make the filter and “overtone” react differently to different keys. While this is a neat feature, I’d love to see the ability to turn it off or an easy way to reset points on the line. StringZ2 is loaded with a variety of presets and some of the presets make great use of the keyboard-image filter.

So for features, it has a bit more than you expect, for example is the feature I just mentioned, but also there are 2 ADSR envelopes (one for volume and one for time). There are also reverb and a lot of other useful parts that are pleasant to look at and easy enough to navigate.
As for stability, you see, I’m running a dual core computer and this VST is made with SynthEdit. And as with all SynthEdit creations, I can’t run more than one instance at a time or everything gets buggy. But I believe this limitation is worth it, and those not on multi-cores should not have an issue.

As for cost? This is free, it's unique, and it’s great.

User Interface - It's purple, very purple, with white lettering and lights. Yava 2 is layed out well, and easy to navigate, (and yeah, white on purple is kinda weird, but not that bad really), if anything, the Gui size is a slight bit large, but not without reason. Let's go 7, it's not really a "beautiful" sight, (unless you really like purple, I wonder if Odo has this synth ha-ha), but it's more than good enough to use and doesn't give me a headache or anything crazy ha-ha.

Sound - Yava 2 is listed as a *hybrid* synth, but the manual says it's a *virtual analog* synth. Well, I thought it sounded warmly digital, or digitally warm ? If this was a blind test, I'd have guessed an fm synth with lots of fx and modulations. You can get some pretty fat sounding brassy, pad, and just old skool "synth" sounds out of it though, and many of those types are included in the presets. Overall, it sounded a bit digital to me, and the presets seemed to lean toward a more fm sound, but a warm and complex fm sound. I'm going 8 here, it's got one foot in analog land, and one in fm land, with enough modulation to wobble and gurgle with the best of them.

Features - Lots of features, this thing is feature-ridden ha-ha. There are 72 knobs just in the mod matrix alone, in addition to some gating and dual frequency sequencers ! I could go into detail, but lets' just say, tweaker's heaven and leave it at that eh. I'm giving it a 9 here, despite not really getting into programming this synth. In addition to the massive modulation matrix, it also has some other unique-ish features and oscillator setup. :)

Documentation - A good .pdf manual with many pictures is included to clue you in. I'm going 9 here, there is some extra info about the unusual features, and some close-up pics to really make sure you're seeing what is being typed about in the manual. This is how it should be done.

Presets - A full bank of 128, and quite a variety overall, some wild stuff in here including some rhythmic loop type stuff, and lots of morphing/evolving type sounds. Let's say 8 for the presets, a lot of them are ready to be played right out of the box, and lots of variety.

Customer Support - Hasn't been an issue, but Krakli is a K-v-R reg, so no worries. Another 9 just because Krakli has been around these parts forever, and is a very experienced dev, I can't imagine it would take long to get a response about this synth.

Value For Money - As with most SE built plug-ins made by K-v-R regs, it's above and beyond in the value department. Other that cpu usage and a few clicks, it's comparable to the $100 big time synths out there in many ways. 9 again, sure there's probably something out there that's a better value, but this is a rare value.

Stability - No crashes or lock ups yet. As mentioned above, the cpu can go up a bit depending on what all you have going on, but the absolute most I saw was about 24%, and it seemed to average around 12%-16% with a couple notes going, and with some longer sounds trailing and burbling away. I'm going to go 8 here, since the cpu is a bit high sometimes, and I did get some clicking on a few patches, no crashes or lock ups occured though.

Final Thoughts - What happened, why didn't this synth take off ? Maybe it actually has too much going on in a way, but even so, with 128 good presets, anyone could've at least tweaked some new sounds out of it from those. A treasure from the past for sure, yeah, there's better out now, but not in this price range. Perhaps this synth will someday be resurrected and updated, with newer/more efficient SE modules and given new life, we can only hope. :)