Minimonsta virtual vintage analog synthesizer

Forget completely flexible software synthesis — what everyone wants, it seems, is emulations of year-old monophonic analogue synths! We check out the latest modelled Minimoog, and see how it compares to the original hardware. It's a decade since the first, tentative steps were taken, but the craze for digital synths that emulate vintage instruments continues unabated. What is it about the Minimoog that inspires this degree of reverence? It can't be the facilities, because these are limited, both in terms of sound generation and performance control. Even today, this remains unsurpassed, and if today's technology can recreate the sound of the Minimoog and couple this to the facilities we've come to expect in the 21st century, we'll have reached some sort of musical Shangri-la.

Why the love affair with those quirky contraptions? After all, they were unstable, undependable and, for a very long time, strictly monophonic. And yet the simplicity and raw power of the analogue synth is hard to deny. Bells and whistles be damned, these instruments were easy to use and satisfied the sonic soul in a particular way that the workstations of the following decades never could. Electronic musicians have always dreamed of harnessing the sonic firepower of the analogue synth and combining it with conveniences like patch memory, dependable tuning and greater polyphony. Enter software synthesizers.

See the NI site for details. I have to give a thumbs-up for the instrument itself. The care and detail have led to a platform that does seem to banish a few detailed complaints about VAs.

Update your browser to view this website correctly. Update my browser now. All four virtual vintage instruments are Mac and Windows compatible and can operate in either stand-alone mode or with VST 2.