Vital massively punches above its weight considering it’s a completely free plugin. Using the same interface and layout as the classics to program your sounds is about as close as you can get to owning the real thing. If you already have some understanding of when you’d reach for a Minimoog or an Arp 2600, this plugin collection will be heaven for you. Not only that, many of these emulations have had some additional features added such as in-built arpeggiators, polyphony, and various effects to take their sound design capabilities above what you could achieve with their real-world counterparts. Anything you could possibly desire for synthwave production! There are 27 classic instruments included in the package, and you’ll find all your favorites here from the Minimoog, the Juno 6, the Jupiter 8, and the OB-Xa. While the instruments can be purchased individually, the collection offers staggering value for money considering how authentic each individual plugin sounds. Taking a slightly different approach from Diva’s module-based system, Arturia has set out to more directly replicate all of the famous and classic synths of yesteryear. It can handle anything from luscious and evolving pads to grinding, aggressive lead sounds. This is a complete powerhouse plugin for producing synthwave music. It’s fairly obvious to see from the UI which classic synth each one of these modules is trying to emulate, which will make your inner synth nerd giggle as you combine a Minimoog oscillator with a Roland Jupiter 6 multimode filter.īut to recreate that classic analog synth sound in a digital form is not a simple process.ĭiva is well known for being quite brutal on your computer’s CPU, so be ready to start freezing tracks if you plan on using multiple instances of the plugin! Final Verdict We get 5 oscillator modules, 5 filter modules, 2 stereo effects slots, and two LFOs to play with. U-HE’s goal with Diva was not to replicate a single synth, but rather to create modules so we can choose our own oscillators, filters, and envelopes and piece them together ourselves. If you were allowed just one VST to produce all of your synthwave tracks with, this should be it. The crew at U-HE have gone to great lengths to meticulously replicate every facet of all our old favorite synths into a ‘ one plugin to rule them all’ package.
So, as the genre has exploded over the last decade, many people understandably want to try their hand at producing synthwave themselves, but don’t know where to start.