Product Reviews by KVR Members

This plug has an enormous collection of drum kits. Natural sounding, beat boxes, jazz kits, electro, disco, et cetera. Also half a dozen GM kits and a few hundred percussion instruments.

The different sounds can easily be navigated through cascading menus. Most menus (Jazz Kit 1 .... Jazz Kit 6) end with a bank of all snares or cymbals of that set of kits. Good idea.

I am thoroughly pleased with the sound of it. Low CPU usage too.

My main complaint is that the engine is not multi-timbral, nor does it respond to program changes, nor can you rearrange banks. That means that right now I have a piece that uses one drum kit for the bass and snare, another for hi-hat and bunch of cymbals, and one for just a chinese ride that is not available elsewhere. That is *three* plugins for just the drum set. I'm sorry, that could have been done more elegantly. (I've reflected this in my low score for features.)

The manual is brief, and unfortunately generic for all the plugsound modules, but it's fine in general; comes with a handy chart of all kits and hits.

I got this plug on sale from BigFish Audio for $50. A steal. If you have to pay $100 for it you may want to consider RM IV or so instead which is more powerful, but also more expensive.

(I am using the AU format. Yea for PlugSound for releasing a true native version!)

EDIT The more I'm using this box, the more I'm convinced that reusing the same GUI of the other PlugSound modules for a drum machine was a big mistake. You can not pan individual toms, so right now I have 3 instances running because I want my bass/snare centred, congas right, cymbals left. Not possible with just one plug, even if you found all these sounds in one set. Hence my low score for the GUI.

(disclaimer: I beta tested the Mac OS X port)

This is a thoroughy fun piece of software. All those cheesy organ sounds from groups that couldn't afford a B3 are now within your reach. However, be sure that you are looking for that transistor organ sound, because this isn't anything like a B3. If you think the "strings" button will give you anything like a Solina strings, you are also wrong.

Let's put this a bit more positively. This is a very idiosyncratic instrument, and it's very good at what it does: reproducing that very retro sound, warts and all. It is also unique: there is nothing else like it.

There is a long list of presets, so that should get you under way to exploring the various possibilities of this organ.

I have a few complaints about the interface. Due to the way the light falls on the switches they are actually dim when on and bright when off. Also the layout is initially a little confusing, but I won't take you more than a minute to figure it out.

In the value-for-money category, you'll have to decide how much you're going to use this kind of sound. Personally, I find the price slightly high for a plug that I may use once in a very long while. But that's different for everyone. If you're screaming for this sound, then it's quite cheap.

On Mac OS X this plug works fine through the AU-VST adapter, but I hope DashSignature will make a native AU version anyway.

Electron was the first serious synth I bought, so it's what I learned programming analog synthesis on. (Hardware? What's that?) For this purpose it's an excellent beast. Clearly laid out controls, and the manual explains the not-immeidately-obvious aspects very well. (Ok, I wish it explained more clearly what the difference between the transpose and detune controls are when oscillators are sync'ed.)

There are some things that I can't judge: Muon is very proud of their alias-free oscillators. I guess so. There are other synths on the market that don't remark on this that sound fine to me too.

Having played with other soft synths I see as the main limitation of Electron that the oscillators have fixed waveforms. The sawtooth and square wave sound "sweet", and it is hard to get Electron to produce the aggressive tones you get from a triangle wave.

That said, there are lots of routing / modulation possibilities, and the oscilators and filters sound good at what they do. I have no problem getting useful sounds out of this synth.

I have a few other niggles with the user interface, but nothing major. Actually, there is strange bug in the slider for the cross-fade between the filters. Once you know that, you simple grab it at the corner instead of the middle of the slider.

The presets are not great, but there are several good bank for download right here on kvr.

It's ridiculous how easy it is to get good fat sounds out of this thing. I can't listen to some trance music anymore without thinking, oh, I can make that sound with Beast in no time flat. Great little synth, and very reasonably priced.

My only complaints are with the user interface, where a couple of little lights have very counterintuitive functions. I mean three settings red/green/off?!?!

Other than that nothing but praise.