Charlatan

Don't be fooled by its basic interface. This synth is very capable and has a great sound that will sit perfectly in any production. Because it's so lightweight on your CPU, you can use as many synth layers as you want without taxing your computer. Charlatan does exactly what every subtractive synth should do but nothing more. There is no arpeggiator or no effect included. Just add your favorite delay, chorus, and/or reverb to it and you are set for any real world production. Soundwise, you will get the same kind of sound as the old synths like the Juno, but you'd be hard pressed to distinguish it from one of the big boys.

Because it is so basic, Charlatan invites you to tweak your sound instead of browsing through hundreds or thousands of presets. I consider it the best synth to learn out there.

I'll make it short : I've nothing else to add and to cut off to all the good things said about this synth by other reviewers.

Charlatan sounds pretty good, is simple, efficient with low CPU consomption. What else ?

It's my workhorse when I want to make a sound with no hassle.

This only cons is the lack of internal preset management. It uses the host one... if it has one.

Of course it's a encouragement to do sounds by ourselves and that's easy with this synth. But when I do a sound in a DAW and want to use it in a soft that doesn't offer VST presets management (like Maschine), I have to mimic the tunings by hand, like on a oldschool hardware synth with no memory. An incongruity in the digital world.

This is a remarkable instrument. You can tell it was made not just by a good programmer trying to engineer a synth in the ways that sound good on paper, but by an artist who knows how to tweak a synth to make it sound good musically.

Softsynths don't really get a better core sound than this. The oscillators and filters are perfect, very crisp and full. Great brightness without harshness, and warm low-mid presence without muddiness. The envelopes have great curvature, snappy decays and nice attack/release fading on pads. Unison detune rings out with good texture instead of the waveforms clashing into noise the way a synths' unisons do.

Great interface. Parameters left-to-right along the signal path, and is attractive and responsive. This is a very well-made plug-in. I've had no glitches or odd behavior even with many instances running at a time.

I couldn't believe this thing is a freebie. It would have fetched a few hundred bucks just a decade ago.

It's hard to describe why I keep going back to this plugin even if I have a ton of other commercial alternatives. Maybe it's the great sound. Maybe it's the intuitive interface. Maybe it's just the stripped down features. Or maybe it's all of the above.

Plenty of character, lovely filters and actually just the right feel of how a slider or knob responds in the GUI (So many plugins just misses this detail) and all of this for free makes it a no brainer.

This is a track I made using only Charlatan for all sounds, including drums. Not one time did I feel the need to load another plugin and that is the true mark of a great instrument.

https://soundcloud.com/oscillian/dark-dawn.

Charlatan is very limited:

• It does not have 3 Oscillators with heaps of waveforms.
• It does not have 64 modulation slots.
• It does not have any effects.
• It does not have an arpeggiator.
• It does not have a photorealistic GUI with wooden sideparts.
• It has only 16 knobs, 8 sliders and 31 buttons.

I like that.

When I first saw Charlatan, I instantly took to the GUI. It is extremely user-friendly, well layed-out, and all GUI elements are big enough so they can be easily handled with a mouse. And it is red, because red synths obviously sound better, according to "stanlea" from the official thread.

Once you get used to the limited feature set and remember that the elders of yore actually got some nice sounds out of their similarly limited minimoogs and pro-ones, you will discover that Charlatan is in fact quite versatile and capable of creating lots of different sounds. The limitations here need to bee seen as a feature, you are not overwhelmed by endless possibilities but can concentrate on creating good sounds that you can actually use in a song instead of just listen to in a preset.

All that would be useless of course if the sound wasn't good, but fortunately, it is. Charlatan has a very pleasant basic sound, nice and round with a beefy low-end, maybe not the last word in analogue emulation, but I don't think it is intended to be.

Charlatan may not be the most innovative synth, and especially nowadays where we soon have more virtual synthesizer plugins than ants on the planet, this seems a handicap. But as Charlatan has all the qualities of a good workhorse - good sound, ease of use and low CPU consumption - I am sure that it will find its way into many a song.