BlauKraut Engineering has released Charlatan – a free polyphonic, subtractive virtual analog software synthesizer for Windows.
Here’s what the developer has to say about Charlatan:
Charlatan is a polyphonic, subtractive virtual analog 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.
Features:
- 2 oscillators with triangle, sawtooth, rectangle and noise waveforms
- oscillator pulse-width modulation (PWM) and slew rate modulation (morphing between triangle and sawtooth)
- oscillator hard synchronization and ring modulation
- 2 ADSR envelope generators
- 1 LFO
- 3 filter types emulating nonlinear characteristics of classic hardware: 4-pole (24 db/oct) and 2-pole (12 db/oct) lowpass, bandpass
- 3 voice modes: Monophonic with retriggering, Monophonic Legato and 8-voice Polyphonic
- low CPU usage
- 100% coded in C++
- native 64-bit support
If you give Charlatan a try, let us know what you think of it!
It’s a great synth. You have to tweak a bit to build up the sound you have in mind, but its possibilities are a lot, despite its simplicity.
Moreover, CPU consumption is very low.
Hey I’ve been trying out the Charlatan synth on my korg nankey but I can’t get the keys to play chords together. Its just one or the other key when i press both or more keys. Can someone help me out with that?
Found it, it was just under global settings, Poly duh.