SimSynth Live

bought this purely because ive had the standalone simsynth2 for ages and love its sound but since i really got fully into vst [i used to be purely audio] its more and more of a hassle to sub-sequence in simsynth and import to my main sequencer ... the chance to own a vsti built around the same synth engine was too good to pass up ...

good stuff ...

.3 [or 6 if you double ['warm'] them up real quality oscillators ... leading to a ...

.big big sound [oberheim / moog hybrid if you like]

.excellent filter [oberheim-style state variable filter]

.no-nonsense gui ... everything is clearly laid out [and the little graphical envelopes are useful too ... if a tad on the small side]

.built-in effects packs [all switch-offable if you so desire] ... the delay / phaser / and reverb are so-so imho but the parametric eq is pretty cool as an extra

.pretty light on the old cpu cycles

.handy little lfo for livening stuff up

overall ...

a nice simple to program yet very characterful synth capable of everything from throbbing bass to screeching leads ... firmly in the va camp [but thats no bad thing really] ... will probably see most use from me as a bass synth [might finally dump the venerable tau from my virtual rack] as its capable of some truly fat [pHAT ? ] noises ...

... the first vst ive bought cos of instrument nostalgia [though not hardware yearning in my case :-) ]Read Review