Grok 02SM

Fantastic Emulation of The Sm-02 or whatever the codename is.

Nice Two oscillator analog Va with great sonic possbilities. With the continued delay of a certain
comparable Vsti, this makes a welcome addition to any
plugin list.The fact that its free makes it a great deal!. Seriously though, if you liked Oberon, Tsunami,
or any of the EFM Va's, this will make your day.

2600 anyone?Read Review

Note: As a reviewer, I try to be very hard on softsynths, free or otherwise. As a result, my rating scores might be lower than other equivalent reviews.

This is a neat little free softsynth. It works fine in Cubase SX and also Sonar via the VST to DX adaptor. There were no install hassles (simply copy the files to the VSTPlugins directory), and no crashes or other side effects of having this plugin installed.

The sound seems like it would be authentic, but I don't have a true, uh, "02-SM" to compare it to. Most of the included presets are pitch shifted +3 semitones, but that's because the MG EG1 is set to 5, and not 0. At 0, the pitch is correct. Controlling the knobs via mouse seems to be a hybrid linear/circular operation that works correct 75% of the time, but 25% of the time, the control works opposite of your mouse movement. The UI looks good and clean. There is no documentation.

Automation doesn't seem to be well implemented. I was unable to automate controls via VST automation in Cubase, and it didn't seem to respond to MIDI automation. I was able to automate certain parameters in Project 5, which will automate non-automatable softsynths, but unfortunately the internal naming structure of the softsynth is poor, so you need to hunt around for what you want. For example, to automate filter cutoff, you need to choose one of 4 identically named "Pitch" parameters.

I realize I'm being hard on a free softsynth, but I feel this will be useful to someone who wants to compare "02-SM" emulators in the future. This review might save them some time.Read Review