Hello Everybody,
We are pleased to release the freely downloadable Demo VSTi for Win32 of Strings Dream Synthesizer.
The SDS VSTi Full license can be puchased at NUSofting site starting on Wensday this week, release day.
(For 3 weeks at 69 USD introductory price)
The reason why I want to give you this Demo earlier is that I can not resist to ask your feedback,
it was a hard work to bring you this little toy, months of work, but there is still room for improvements I think,
so I'll be watching to you comments eagerly.
The Demo includes 2 of the 4 skins available.
Demo plugin updated to v1.0
- Trial Time Extended
- Fixed bug with Help Launch and Office installed on Vista
- Fixed sound at 96000 Samplerate
http://dashsignature.com/SDS/String_Dre ... 32_VST.rar
*Notes you must read*
Tweaking The Parameters of SDS.
The 6 stops (C.Bass, Cello, Brass, Horn, Viola, Violin) are modeled after console organs or the big accordions, and should be conceived of in the same way.
C.Bass and Cello are the bass instruments, monophonic in SDS VSTi. Cello has the standard tuning, also called 8' in organs, while C.Bass is one octave lower (16' voice). Their waveforms are fixed and the filters of these voices enhance the low tones.
Brass, Horn and Viola are 8' voices in the standard tuning. The names suggest the kind of filters applied to these stops, therefore Brass is bright and shrill, Horn is a much darker tone, and Viola is more open and even. Using an accurate mixture of these three stops you can emulate a huge array of string machine oscs tones, and many variations besides.
Violin is a 4' voice, which that means that it is one octave above the Brass, Horn and Viola. Note that for this stop a Phase knob is available, providing a significant harmonic change when the Violin is layered with another stop.
(Not with Square wave)
Note also that C.Bass and Cello are played only by the keys below the split point (the note set by the "Split Lower at XX" menu), while the other can be played over the entire range.
Another remarkable feature is the ability to choose from three different waveforms for the set Brass, Horn and Viola, Violin. You get two "sawtooth" waveforms and a "vintage" square. The latter allows for more evocative psychedelic effects.
The spectrum of the oscillators sound can be further shaped by the Brightness and HPF controls. Brightness boosts the high frequencies and HPF controls the main highpass filter. Raising the value of this parameter reduces the low frequencies. This is very useful when emulating the lighter texture of a viola or violin ensemble.
The Amp Envelope.
This is a full four-stage ADSR envelope (attack time, decay time, sustain level, release time). The vintage hardware string machines usually featured only attack and release times in order to fade the sound in and out, but we've given you a little more control.
The ADSR mode switch allows to simulate the so called "paraphonic" mode used in the first hardware string machines. When the switch is up, the ADSR is fully polyphonic and plays like a more conventional synthesizer envelope.
The MIDI velocity sensitivity is also something which obviously didn't exist in that funky old gear, but SDS allows it as an option.
The Effects.
The three SDS effects are self-explanatory. Experiment with their knobs and have fun!
[Only note that upper half of Phaser Stages ( 0.5 .. 1) knob, which can sweep a LP filter]
The Midi learn.
Right Click on any controls to show up the MIDI learn menu and to assing MIDI CC as you wish.
Aknowledgements
There are many people who helped for the developement of SDS.
Thanks so much to all of them, especially to:
Marco Verschooren, Aldo Trianti, Bernie Torelli, Guido Scognamilio,
Scot Solida, Cj and all the betatesters, and Branis for the beautiful graphics
Known issues:
- A few Effects parameters may be noisy (crackles) when automated, not in every host though.
- Uneven loudeness of some notes (keys) has been reported as well.
- Switching VST host sampleRate (E.G. 44100 to 96000) may require to restart the plugin to initialize the filters.
Please report what you found.
Thanks.
I've made two nice stabbing patches with StringSynth because it has a filter with resonance, which neither of the other two have. I love the raw sound of eSLine, but the envelope Attack sounds weird to me, too logarithmic (I hope DNA is on it!). This one is probably the mother of them all, except the resonant filter.
