Product Reviews by KVR Members

Perfect basic clipper with nothing less than what you need and nothing more to get in your way.

Hard knee with no oversampling for harsh digital clipping when you want it. Soft knee with oversampling enabled for a clean, basic tube-esque distortion that works greats with unsubtle saturation on drum buses.

This was a weirdly good saturator for the time. Another hidden gem from TBT.

I'm surprised there aren't more envelope-based distortions, even today. An old trick, especially for warming up sub-basses, is to take a compressor with super short minimum envelope times and drive the signal into it like a distortion. It introduces harmonics because the envelope time is shorter than a single cycle of bass-frequency waveforms.

An added benefit to distorting bass this way is that lower frequencies are distorted more than higher frequencies, which narrows the range in the mix that your bass sits at. It's a great bass distortion to use when you are keeping your mix in mind, and want lower bass to come out better through smaller speakers.

This plug-in is one of the few tools ever made to be designed for this very purpose, and it is still useful today.

When this came out, people said it was impossible. A real-time reverse effect? How quaint.

14 years later, I still love to introduce people to it. Through various applications of buffering fuckery, it does what it says it does on the tin, and does a great job of doing it.

This was the first useful free transient shaper, and one of the first useful VST transient shapers free or otherwise. It has held-up well.

The saturation comes off a little harsh today, but I still pull this guy out when the signal I'm processing is a little too complex for a traditional compressor.

Not many VST distortions sounded great in the early 2000's. Much less free ones. This is one of the oldest VSTs that remain on my DAW's VST list. It holds up well.

As noted by another review, it certainly isn't going to excel in the subtle presence of a soft-driven tube amp (neither did any plug-in in 2002). It does do well in being tortured to create mangled sounds.

Credit where credit is due for this old VST.

In the early 2000's there weren't many emulations of string ensemble synthesizers that were popular in the late 70's. Of course you could throw some modulation effects on a basic rampwave patch if you wanted to, but it was nice having a free string ensemble ready to go, with some clear attention to detail spent on having such particular voicing and modulation resemble that of the vintage machines it is emulating.

There may not be much use for it now; the sound has held up about as well as any other VST from 2002 - but this quirky little synth brought me much entertainment in an age when there simply weren't many VSTs around, especially of this type, and especially for free. I'll still use it from time to time, with an oversampler that breathes a little bit of life back into it.

A severely under-rated freebie.

I'm not going to say it sounds exactly like the Oberheims it is emulating, but the spacey, metallic shimmer is there. It's rare for a basic subtractive synth to be able to set itself apart and sound different from others while still being useful.

My go-to for retrofuturistic spacey pads, it has a classic sci-fi sound. It doesn't require much post-processing - just a touch of the clearest reverb you have and scoop out a bit of low-mids and you're there.

The only drawback that it has is the unison-detune being limited to monophony, which is a shame because the unison sounds remarkable in pads.

Life-changing synth. If you've hit a wall in your ascent to being the big name producer that you want to be, and are wondering what synth will take you to the big league, this is likely it. I wish more developers took a page from OnePingOnly's book when designing their instruments. My music was lacking that special something, and boy am I glad I found that special something.

Don't let the lack of a GUI fool you.

This is one of the first/oldest VSTs that blew my socks off with its sound quality. I don't have as much use for it now, but it still sounds as good as anything out there and would be perfectly adequate for a bread-and-butter subtractive synthesizer. Antti never got enough credit for this.

This is a remarkable instrument. You can tell it was made not just by a good programmer trying to engineer a synth in the ways that sound good on paper, but by an artist who knows how to tweak a synth to make it sound good musically.

Softsynths don't really get a better core sound than this. The oscillators and filters are perfect, very crisp and full. Great brightness without harshness, and warm low-mid presence without muddiness. The envelopes have great curvature, snappy decays and nice attack/release fading on pads. Unison detune rings out with good texture instead of the waveforms clashing into noise the way a synths' unisons do.

Great interface. Parameters left-to-right along the signal path, and is attractive and responsive. This is a very well-made plug-in. I've had no glitches or odd behavior even with many instances running at a time.

I couldn't believe this thing is a freebie. It would have fetched a few hundred bucks just a decade ago.