Free Vintage Synthesizer Emulation VST Plugins By Kevin Brown

Kevin Brown has released a huge archive of free SynthMaker creations in 32-bit VST plugin format for Windows, emulating classic vintage analogue synthesizers and a few “reduced emulations” of modern digital synthesizers like U-He Bazille, ACE and Diva, which aren’t dead serious attempts to recreate U-He’s enormously powerful instruments so much as being a fun personal project.

Among the list of “all things vintage” are emulations of popular analogue and digital synthesizers from manufactures like EMS, Sequential Circuits, ARP, Buchla, Moog, Korg, Yamaha, Roland, Ensoniq and plenty others. I think it’s important to point out that developer Kevin Brown has made it perfectly clear on the DSPRobotics forum that due to his lack of knowledge of very specific coding methods and also having no direct access to the original hardware, he will no longer be working on these instruments, and is open to having a more seasoned developer make improvements upon the existing source code.

That being said, even though I agree there is a considerable margin for improvement, I think he’s being a little modest. The plugins actually sound very good, especially the Roland emulations. At times, they can sound a bit “digital”, as is often the case with the vast majority of instruments created in SynthMaker/FlowStone, but even at their über-digital worst, the sound quality is very good.

One thing you will notice right away is that there are no presets, which might be a deal breaker for some. However, I think that’s a little unreasonable, especially considering how charming a lot of these instruments are, even if they aren’t perfect clones of their hardware counterparts. Some of them might even be scooped up by a major developer… Remember when DiscoDSP took over the OB-Xd project?

Another thing that really impressed me was just how professional these instruments look! I was amazed by how well each interface and its controls are designed. I have commercial plugins that don’t even look this polished! Even though there might be some work to do under the hood, aesthetically, these plugins are perfect as is, even though I could stand to see them vectorized if possible.

I certainly won’t use every single one of these instruments, but I’ve already fallen in love with quite a few of them, so I definitely encourage you to check them out if you haven’t already. As I explained, they may not be mirror images of the hardware that inspired them, but you can tell that a serious amount of work went into each plugin, regardless of how much more work is required to make them what they could be.

The plugins are available for free download via K Brown Synths (32-bit VST plugin format for Windows, including SynthMaker project files).

Source: Rekkerd