Vanguard

There has been much ado about this synth in KVR forums, strangely enough, i don't see any review here, so i'm going to fill the gap.
Vanguard project was initially supposed to be an upgrade of JunoX2 (rip) but it developed much beyond the initial intentions.

Vanguard has been compared to Access Virus, but that's really a wrong idea: while it suits perfectly the musical styles the Virus is famous, it has really another character that makes it "unique", as in reFX tradition.
I talked about musical styles: Vanguard comes with built in 128 patches made by the preset wizard Manuel Schleiss, known for the high quality Dance-Techno-Trance preset he made for various hardware synthetizers.
Those patches make of Vanguard, "out of the box", the perfect VSTi for those musical styles. Sounds are powerful, very actual and definite. But Vanguard is much more.
There are other 2 banks you can load to experiment with more various sounds, ranging from electro to experimental.

Vanguard is an easy synth to play with: you have 3 OSC, 3 LFO, various filter modes, 2 ADSR (controlling many targets, expanding the JunoX2 model) and 3 built in fx (Distortion, reverb and delay).

The sound of the digital OSC is sometime very harsh but you can get some really interesting and unique sounds from them.
There are also a "trancegate" (a programmable gating effect) and an easy arpeggiator, that may be combined to work togheter to trigger some really creative notes :)

Generally speaking, Vanguard, like all reFX synths, is not an "all round" machine.
It has a very definite charachter and is mostly aimed to agressive types of music.
You can get nice evolving pads from it, but nothing close to something Vangelis would use.
More likely, The Prodigy would use it :)

Trancegate and the arpeggiatore make of it a very effective "fast" filler for emptyness in your tracks, while his punch will cut through your mix when used as a lead or bass.
The GUI is very simple and everybody can start making sounds after 10 minutes.

Despite some charactheristics (that someone may define as "osc bugs"), it's an absolutely necessary weapon in every dance [and derivates] studio. And for it's price, it's a real bargain.
Sure, if you're looking for an all around analog working horse, look somewhere else.Read Review