Retrologue by Steinberg

[Gam456]

It's a really nice synth. Will be great if Steinberg will improve this one... but seems, that they don't do it with their old products...

Which improvements do you suggest?

Simple, look what Diva can do. Alternate pan, drift, component modelling vco, vcf, vca,
zero delay feedback no artefacts or aliasing

It does have a drift control at the top. Simplistic but it works.
Pan spread is automatic, which might not always be welcome, especially with basses, where stereo is not so good.
I don't hear aliasing or artifacts, frankly.
What do you mean by modeling? That it is not emulating any specific hardware?

It's a random pitch, the drift in Diva works like slow wavering
Diva also have a drift called variance for vcf, env, glide and pw
Yes Diva modelling is per component based on hardware

I'm not saying Retrologue is bad, but for analog feel Diva is undisputed... and definitely not a toy

[cobaia]

But why would a quality synth be a toy? I don't get that. By that logic most classic hardware synths would also have been just toys because many of them were much more basic than Retrologue 2 for instance. And yet those "toys" were used to make classic songs.

Now you're getting it. That's why I sold all of my analog hardware synths. Sure they were used in songs because....that's all we had back then.

I sometimes use the word Toy when comparing one synth with another. It's a comment on the feature set....or lack thereof.

A three Osc synth with a fixed waveform set doesn't hold much appeal to me these days when I have several synths with 24 or more Oscs and theoretically unlimited waveforms that sound just as good or most often even better....to me. After 46 years of owning synths the simple ones with a limited feature set just bore me. YMMV.

Yeah back in 2012 when I started this thread Retrologue was much more impressive to me than it is today due to the other options available literally at our fingertips in 2026. Progress marches on.

We are truly living in the golden age of synthesis.

24 oscillators? What is the point of that? Or do you mean stacked waves?
Do you have an audio clip of what it sounds like?

Usually when one uses more than 2 oscillators, they cancel each other out in terms of character and it turns into a mess.

You can create custom waveforms in Retrologue 2 as well, in any synth whose oscillators have phase control:

[cobaia]

It's a really nice synth. Will be great if Steinberg will improve this one... but seems, that they don't do it with their old products...

Which improvements do you suggest?

Simple, look what Diva can do. Alternate pan, drift, component modelling vco, vcf, vca,
zero delay feedback no artefacts or aliasing

It does have a drift control at the top. Simplistic but it works.
Pan spread is automatic, which might not always be welcome, especially with basses, where stereo is not so good.
I don't hear aliasing or artifacts, frankly.
What do you mean by modeling? That it is not emulating any specific hardware?

It's a random pitch, the drift in Diva works like slow wavering
Diva also have a drift called variance for vcf, env, glide and pw
Yes Diva modelling is per component based on hardware

I'm not saying Retrologue is bad, but for analog feel Diva is undisputed... and definitely not a toy

Yes, I know that trimmer page. I don't really want or need variance except for pitch because without pitch variance, playing the same note twice can sound ugly when there is a longer release time and they overlap.
Cutoff and envelope variance is usually achieved via velocity.