Cinematique Instruments is a manufacturer of rare and unique instrument sound libraries. Even though their instrument repertory has a slight focus on film music, they are perfectly suitable for all musical genres. It’s all about how you use them.

For a while now, I’ve been playing with one of their Kontakt instruments called Shruti Box (No longer available).

What is Shruti Box?

Here’s a quote from Cinematique Instruments website: the Shruti Box is a traditional Indian instrument which works on a system of bellows. It is a keyless version of the harmonium, which was invented for the specific purpose of producing drone sounds. On the front it has 12 valves to control the pitch. The instrument is generally used to accompany other instruments in rehearsal sessions or concerts of classical Indian music. But the shruti box is enjoying a renaissance in the West amongst traditional and contemporary musicians who are using it for a range of different styles.

Cinematique Instruments has made a virtual version of the Shruti Box. They have sampled the individual notes from the original Shruti, including the noises which are produced by the bellow. The real Shruti Box has a range of 13 notes, but the virtual version has been expanded up to 3 full octaves. There’s also two kinds of pump actions which can be switched on separately to get a realistic Shruti sound, pump and crackle.

To shape the sound further, you’ll find an effects section which contains distortion, chorus, reverb and a rotary simulation effects plus a special sustain mode which will let the Shruti play as a continuous drone.

There’s also a LFO modulation section which makes it possible to create all kinds of evolving rhythmic textures. You can modulate different parameters such as EQ frequency, LO-FI and panning with four different waveform types with a variable speed. The LFO speed can either be “free” or synced to host. In free mode, there’s also a cool auto move function available which’ll change the LFO speed automatically. It’s great for those endlessly changing, ambient style pads.

Does Shruti Box work in electronic music?

In my opinion, yes. Even though it does fit great for film music, nothing stops you using it in EM as well. I think it suits well for those psychedelic pads in the background of your track. If used with taste, it can give a nice flavor of something different and bit of ethnic to your electronic music. That would be something you won’t hear in every EDM track out there.

Verdict: Shruti box is a nice Kontakt instrument if you want to expand your instrument library to something more ethnic and special. I think it sounds like accordion “in steroids” or something with all those extra effects and modulation possibilities. It’s fresh and psychedelic.

Details:

• Shruti Box (No longer Available) by Cinematique Instruments
• Kontakt 4.22 or later full version is required
• Price: 28 EUR (approximately 38 USD)

Watch the video below where I create something simple with the Shruti Box:

The post Review: Shruti Box By Cinematique Instruments appeared first on How To Make Electronic Music.

Futucraft has released a free monophonic virtual instrument called Kairatune. This cool little VST synth represents Finnish know-how and it has been designed to produce crisp and tight electric sounds for electronic music production.

Here’s more details (quote from Futucraft website):

Kairatune is engineered for the demanding producer who needs to push the sound to extremes without compromising audio quality.

Kairatune offers fast and intuitive sound design workflow. The user interface is designed for a musician rather than an engineer and is based on the concept of pitch and beat in contrast to frequency and time. Kairatune lets you travel in the world of beats, notes and intervals instead of the logarithmic mathematics of frequencies and the rarely useful absolute time.

Kairatune is not your all-in-one synthesizer. It’s designed and engineered to be as powerful and versatile as possible in it’s target role as your source for tight bass, unique lead and shiny SFX sounds. At the same time it makes all the effort to be simple enough to use, enabling you to add your personal touch and flavor to the sound and seek for the perfect fit to your mixing preferences.

Kairatune’s sound engine consists of

• generator section,
• pitch section,
• spread section,
• amp section,
• filter section and
• effects section.

Generator

The generator section has just one multi-oscillator. The basic waveform generator is very simple adjustable mix of sawtooth and square wave. The multi-oscillator generates five waveforms whose relative pitch, phase and amplitude may be configured and modulated enabling a rich set of tones. The multi-oscillator uses quite unusual technique that generates a single fundamental signal independently of the (multiple) overtones, preventing the beating effect that arises where several oscillators are output in slightly detuned unison, yet preserving the full and fat sound on the overtone spectrum. The method enables building very rich and full sounds on a perfectly solid bottom and is especially useful in creating tight bass and low register lead sounds.

Pitch

The pitch can be modulated by a traditional vibrato, by a trill modulator and by a shared (sinewave) LFO source. The trill modulator is basically a square wave LFO. The modulation depth of all three modulators is independently controllable by an envelope. This enables the momentary use of quite extreme modulation. With the modulation envelopes the exact time and duration of the modulation can be set to produce some quite interesting effects and timbres.

Spread

The spread section makes the sound appear to oscillate in the stereo field. It uses a variable amount of high frequency damping and delay to create the illusion of movement.

Amp

The amp section modulates the amplitude by an AHDSR envelope and the shared LFO source and velocity. The asymmetric waveshaper can handle quite extreme driving without audible aliasing.

Filters

The filters section has a resonant lowpass filter and a resonant highpass filter. The cutoff frequency can be modulated independently by an AHDSR envelope and the shared LFO source. The lowpass filter’s cutoff frequency can be modulated by a spread modulator, which creates interesting effect in the stereo image, especially on high resonance configuration.

Effects

The effects section runs two delay units in parallel. One has a pre highpass filter and the other has a bandpass filter in the feedback chain. The cutoff frequency of the BPF is modulated by an dedicated LFO. The BPF delay is capable of some really interesting sounds on high feedback configuration. The effects section contains also a six stage phaser and two EQ units with selectable mode.

Check some preset sound examples of Kairatune from the video below:

Download Kairatune.

The post Kairatune | Free Monophonic VSTi By Futucraft appeared first on How To Make Electronic Music.

In case you haven’t downloaded this cool free VST synth yet, now is the time! Green Oak’s Crystal has been around for a quite some time. It’s very good for those ambient type of weird soundscapes and fx’s around your song, but it’s also capable of a LOT more.

Here’s more details about Crystal:

What is Crystal?

Crystal is a semi-modular software synthesizer featuring both subtractive synthesis and frequency modulation (FM) synthesis. It offers abundant modulation control with over 90 parameters which may be modulated, multi-stage envelopes with graphical editors, extensive tempo sync of envelopes/lforates/delay times, built-in effects for chorus/flanging/comb filtering/echoes, and a band splitter for effects processing by frequency band. Not only that, Crystal has wave sequencing, granular synthesis, program morphing, MIDI learn, and imports soundfonts. The musical applications for Crystal are literally boundless.

Requirements

An Intel processor is the minimum cpu to use Crystal on a Mac (or a better than 1GHz cpu if you’re on a PC). Crystal is rather cpu-intensive. Simple semi-modular synthesizers have already been done. My goal with Crystal was to offer something more. So, by its very nature, it will require more cpu than a basic virtual analog synth.

After you download and install Crystal, start up your virtual instrument host and load Crystal into your song. Try out the presets that come with Crystal to get an idea of the kinds of sounds you can make with it. As you’re listening to the presets, note that some of the pads, ambient, and atmospheric presets take a while to evolve, so be patient: hold down a note and wait for it to develop. By the way, when you listen to the “Tempo Synced” presets, turn your song tempo up to a dance tempo of 140-150 in order to get them to sound snappy. Also, note that the “Swell” programs are tempo sync’d, so hit the note on the “1”, and the sound will climax on the “1” of the next measure. The patch names that end with “MW” are setup to do something interesting when you move your mod wheel, so be sure to wag it around when trying out those patches.

Check some sound examples from the video below:

Download Crystal.

The post Green Oak Crystal Free VST Synth appeared first on How To Make Electronic Music.

EDIT: Sorry, this plugin creator has since taken down their site and plugin.  If you want to check out some more FREE VST’s, check out this page.

Just downloaded and tested Phenome, free SoundFont player by Prodyon Virtual Gear. Looks great and sounds great! There’s 420 MB (unpacked) worth of factory content sounds included. That’s 132 presets in total. Check the video below for sound examples. This VST synthesizer comes highly recommended for your home studio arsenal.

Quoted from Prodyon Virtual Gear website:

Overview

PHENOME is a low-CPU 8-part multitimbral Soundfont (SF2) Player-VST Instrument with all the basic features like ADSR, multiple filters and arpeggiators.
It has been designed to focus on getting things done quickly rather then being bloated with features that get hardly ever used.

In Detail

You select on of the eight layers of PHENOME and load any Soundfont you have into it. From there you choose the patch you want (and bank). Each layer has controls for volume, pan, muting, one of eight(!) stereo-outputs and much more…

Create complete multi-setups

All eight soundfonts that you can load and play simultaneously can be “saved” in one setup or “multi” using your host´s FXB (Bank-Save)-feature.
This way you can easily save your favourite custom settings/multis and load them back later in another song or project.

PHENOME also features full recall/automation and MIDI-learn for almost every control on screen!
The mapping is easy: Right-Click a control of your choose and choose “Learn”.

There is much more to explore – so download your free copy of PHENOME today and start playing!

System Requirements

To make full use of PHENOME a decent Windows-PC is a must-have. 1Ghz Single-Core Processor and 256 MB RAM is the minimum to run PHENOME.
Windows XP/Vista/7 (TM) , 32-Bit. (64 Bit not tested). XP Users: Service Pack 2 required! PHENOME hasn´t been test on V-Machine yet.

Download (Sorry, plugin no longer exists)

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