Charlatan by Dominique Wurtz.
Dominique Wurtz has released Charlatan (included in BPB’s best freeware synthesizer VSTi plugins list), a freeware virtual analog synthesizer in VSTi plugin format for Windows.
Hey guys, after nearly 2 years of development (spare-time only), I proudly announce the release of Charlatan, a virtual analog synthesizer plugin. Although I declared the current release as beta, it is working perfectly stable for me (I’m using REAPER). I just like to wait for feedback from other people before making a 1.0 release.
Charlatan is a polyphonic, subtractive virtual analog (VA) software synthesizer plugin whose design focuses on sound quality and easy usability. The design philosophy was to provide a feature set just large enough to cover a wide range of sounds rather than an infinite number of parameters and modulation options cluttering the user interface and distracting from the creative process. That said, Charlatan’s synthesis architecture is flexible enough to create all kinds of sounds, from conventional classic leads, basses and pads to weird blips and noises.
While making no compromises about sound quality, the algorithms have been optimized for efficient CPU usage making Charlatan well suited as a ”bread and butter” synth even in projects with a large number of plugin instances. Best of all, it’s FREEWARE! I’m happy to hear your opinions and suggestions! Enjoy!
Charlatan is available for free download via BlauKraut Engineering.
Features
Main features of Charlatan:
- 2 oscillators with classic analog waveforms triangle, sawtooth and rectangle
- rectangle of oscillator 1 with pulse-width modulation (PWM)
- triangle of oscillator 1 with slew rate modulation (morphing between triangle and sawtooth)
- noise generator
- Oscillator hard synchronization and ring modulation
- 2 ADSR envelope generators for amplitude, filter cutoff and pitch modulation
- 1 low-frequency oscillator (LFO) for filter cutoff and pitch modulation
- 3 nonlinear filter types emulating characteristics of classic hardware: 4-pole (24 db/octave slope) lowpass and bandpass, 2-pole (12 db/octave slope) lowpass
- 3 voice modes: Monophonic with retriggering, Monophonic Legato and 8-voice Polyphonic
- low CPU usage
- 100% coded in C++
Links
Download Charlatan: click here
Download Free Charlatan Presets: click here
5 Comments
mono
oni was messing around with this synth for awhile now and it is really great. the oscillators are right up there with commercial moog emulations and better than the tyrell n6 for sure considering the cpu. if you we could have a saw on both oscillators, maybe a sub osc and touch up the envelopes a little this could be a new favorite for me!
layzer
onVery very NICE VA. i love the small size, the occilators sound very crisp and defined. what i would really love to see on this is amplitude and filter Velocity modulation. add that and we have a truly killer vst.