Dominique Wurtz has released version 0.9.2 beta of Charlatan, a free synthesizer instrument plugin for Windows.
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.
Charlatan features
- 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/oct) lowpass and bandpass, 2-pole (12 db/oct) lowpass.
- 3 voice modes: Monophonic with retriggering, Monophonic Legato and 8-voice Polyphonic.
- Low CPU usage.
- 100% coded in C++.
Charlatan is available to download as a freeware VST instrument plug-in for Windows.
More information: Charlatan (KVR)
