TAL-U-No-LX

I don't do many reviews but some things get me excited. Tal u no lx is one of those. The previous review covers the nuts and bolts. It has been several years now that U no lx has been out and it still competes with the best. Because we can use many instances of this fine VST, we can do alot more than what the cover suggests. On a forum post about desert Island synths I chose U no lx. Simply because I create better, faster and more enjoyable than any other that I have. The only gripe is that is doent pass MIDI through it so setting up layers with multiple instances is more steps than need be.

U-NO-LX by Togu Audio Line is a faithful software emulation of the Roland Juno 60. It has the classic look, right down to the sliders, switches, and color scheme. But, more importantly, it has captured the vintage sound: lush pads, silky strings, and deep basses. It's easy to create good sounds with U-NO. As with the hardware version, the architecture is simple, yet powerful: DCO, HPF, VCF, VCA, ADSR, LFO, Chorus, OSC, Filters, Envelope Control, Arp, etc. Several patches seem to be authentic recreations of the original factory set. This plugin takes me back, and playing it eases the pain and suffering I still feel from selling the original back in the day.

PROS:

• Straight forward and easy to program
• Great sounding
• Creamy chorus
• Fantastic zero-feedback delay filter
• Rich resonance
• Lots of cool patches, including the original banks
• What it does, it does really, really well!
• Bargain price
• Frequent updates
• Responsive developer.

CONS:

• Not the most versatile or dirty soft synth, but it's not meant to be.

I highly recommend TAL's U-NO-LX to anyone creating music electronically, especially vintage enthusiast, retro sound design junkies, and rookies, who want to learn synthesis on a legendary synth. It should be noted that TAL has been giving away their plugins for many, many years. U-NO-LX is an amazing creation, and as much as we deserve to use it — TAL deserves a few bucks for creating it. Tommy Zai gives U-NO-LX two thumbs up. Great job TAL. Thank you for breathing life back into an old friend. :-).

A broken Juno. That's what this is. Because this synth has a critical bug in its voice allocation system.

Basically, if you use TAL-U-No-62 polyphonically with long release times, there will be occurrences where previous notes are overwritten in an unpredictable, antagonistic manner.

TAL U-No-LX does not have this problem in either RR or N voice allocation modes. In fact, I've never found a synth that intentionally implements the strange behavior TAL-U-No-62 does. Surprisingly, the predecessor version TAL-U-No-60 doesn't suffer from this issue, so long as "Save CPU" is turned off (if on, it severely compromises polyphony in a completely different manner).

Unfortunately, this freebie is unlikely to ever be updated or fixed, as it's immensely old, and it's existence stands in competition with TAL U-No-LX, despite the fact that this old freebie is not as accurate or as feature-rich.

Again, this problem only appears to affect long release times on released keys, when subsequent notes play when a release tail is active. This should not affect chord or pad type sequences, only arpeggios that use long release times as a feature. If you are using gated polyphonic sounds or monophonic sounds, this is a non-issue. So I give it 2 stars for that, but it's still a lacerated synth, and it saddens me that it was left this way.

TAL-U-No-62 had potential. It had a solid foundation, and its DNA would live on to TAL-Elek7ro (which doesn't have this bug) and eventually TAL NoiseMaker, and likely TAL's commercial synths to some degree as well. But I can only recommend it fully if you restrict it to gated mode, or in monophonic mode, or otherwise rely very little on the release time parameter.

So, polyphonic leads with overlapping release tails? Don't bother. Expect buggy, randomly cut release tails. Just use gate mode with delay/reverb, or try TAL-U-No-60.