| Cherry Audio Dreamsynth, first original synth plugin pays tribute to the 80s analog/digital synths Cherry Audio Dreamsynth takes famous elements from 80’s analog & digital synths and brings them together in their first original synth plugin. Cherry Audio is a young software company that has been making waves in recent years with their very affordable, solid Synthesizer emulations. Not to be forgotten is Voltage Modular, a Eurorack-inspired modular Synthesizer with which they started as a company. So far, the developers have attracted attention with their emulations. Today they introduced their first original Synthesizer called DREAMSYNTH DS-1. It’s not an emulation but a new synth that pays tribute to the 80s analog and digital synths. Dreamsynth Cherry Audio Cherry Audio DREAMSYNTH Dreamsynth pulls familiar elements from hardware synths from 80s synths and packs them into a newly designed Synthesizer plugin. The interface has a very classic wooden look and is reminiscent of vintage synthesizers. The core consists of three dual-waveform oscillators that can be boosted to six simultaneous virtual analog or PCM sample-based oscillators. It combines classic analog waveforms with sampled PCM waveforms from digital synths making new sounds possible. You get a solid library of 430 looping, one-shot, and single-cycle PCM waveforms. The oscillator supports up to 16 voices of polyphony which should be enough for most use cases. An additional analog drift control allows you to increase the authenticity of the engine. Besides the three oscillator blocks, Dreamsynth also features a lush-sounding polyphonic string Synthesizer engine. It operates independently from the main oscillators and thus you can both layer and split across the keyboard. Stereo Filter & Modulation Then, you get a Oberheim-style 12dB/octave multimode stereo filter with cutoff, resonance and other controls. Only one filter flavor surprises me. Since it is supposed to be a Dreamsynth, I would have expected even more filter types like a ladder or Roland-style that covers a wider range of sounds. Modulation side, it is operable with a new mod system with individual pop-up menus and invertiable knobs that includes 20 mod sources and over 40 destinations. It has two classic ADSR envelopes (filter/amp) with velocity and three multi-wave tempo-syncable LFOs. Also here, it is kept very simple. No random generators, multi-segment envelopes… Further, you can polish you sounds with a different vintage-inspired and modern effects, independently assignable to the synth and string section. Starting with multiple distortion and sample-crushing options, a 12-stage phaser, chorus, flanger, and rotary speaker effects. It also hosts different delay types (tape delay…) as well as multiple reverb programs incl. a newly developed Galactic algorithm.
Dreamsynth fully supports MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) and also offers an arpeggiator with tempo sync and option to assign it to the synth or/and string section. According to the Cherry Audio developers, it is ultra-low on CPU load hanks to an optimized code. So that the fun can start immediately, it ships with over 1100 presets from professional sound designers. First Impression I haven’t been able to test Cherry Audio’s Dreamsynth yet. It looks like it’s a very powerful Synthesizer plugin that brings back the sounds of the 80s. My dream synth definitely has more features but that’s a very personal opinion of what you expect from your dream synth. Cherry Audio Dreamsynth is available now for an introductory price of $39 USD instead of $59 USD. It runs as a VST, VST3, and AAX plugin on macOS (Intel + native M1) and Windows. A standalone version is also available. |
