Pianos, Guitars and Vintage Synths: Sounds and Presets
Dive into a vault of vintage synths and more!
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If vintage synths are your thing, we’ve got you covered with a great deal on a huge library and some samples from the past!
This week in Sounds and Presets we’ve got news of a limited offer on a huge library of vintage synths, a new preset pack for Xils-Lab’s latest CS-80 inspired instrument and a new piano for your Montage/Montage M and MODX/MODX+.
Pianos, Guitars and Vintage Synths: Sounds and Presets
UVI Vintage Vault 4
I remember a time when UVI’s vintage synths collection was in single digits. Vintage Vault, as a collection, was merely an apple in their eye. But that is no longer the case, and UVI’s catalogue has blossomed, nay exploded, and their portfolio’s cup runneth over!
Vintage Vault is now in its fourth incarnation and gathers together every library of theirs that is based on vintage synths. And I can tell you, it is HUGE. You want stats? Stats, you say? OK, then, here are some stats:
- Total Size – 281GB
- Number of instruments sampled – 255
- Number of UVI instruments – 36
- Number of presets – 14,407
- Number of samples – 833,947
Big enough for you? I should coco! So, why am I bringing this into the spotlight today? Well, until February 10th, you can grab this for a whopping 50% off. If you already own a previous Vintage Vault, you get a huge chunk of the cost of an upgrade. Own any UVI instrument, and you’ll also get a decent discount.
There’s something for everyone here, and you don’t have to download it all right away. Pick what vintage synths you need and come back for the rest when you need it. Everything works in both UVI’s free Workstation as well as their amazing Falcon instrument, which will allow you to really dig into the weeds!
Of course, the most sensible option would be to purchase their SonicPass subscription and get every single UVI product for just €24 per month or €240 per year. Cancel or pause at anytime and get everything UVI release immediately.
You can pick up Vintage Vault with its discount until February 10th, 2025. Make sure you sign into your UVI account to see what your personal discount offer is.
Galactic Tones for Xils-Lab The Eighty by Vicious Antelope
Xils-Lab’s ‘The Eighty’ only launched a few weeks ago, and there are already third-party presets coming out for it! With some people calling ‘The Eighty’ the best CS-80 software recreation yet, expect to see plenty of new preset banks for it as people discover its power.
Whilst it mimics the original king of vintage synths perfectly, it also adds a third layer and more to allow you to really harness the power of what was Yamaha’s greatest analogue synth ever. Xavier at Xils-Lab has done an amazing job. That work has been recognised and used to its fullest with Galactic Tones from Vicious Antelope.
This bank contains 50 patches inspired by the 80s, delivering a wide range of tones and patches that cover big, evolving and organic soundscapes. They sound as huge as an original CS-80! Check out the demo!
Galactic Tones is available now for just €14 direct from their website.
Artefakt Guitar for HALion 7 and HALion Sonic 7 by Steinberg
If there was ever one kind of sound that I instantly skipped over in a synth’s preset library, it was electric guitar sounds. They always sounded stunted, devoid of any life and cheesy as all hell. Nope, I never used them, I hated them and could never see the point of them.
But of course all of that began to change with the advent of samples, particularly with the advent of deep multi-sampling and scripted interfaces that allowed for vastly more nuanced and authentic electric guitar performances.
Now HALion users can access such things through Steinberg’s own Artefakt Guitar. Featuring over 10,000 recorded notes, riffs, string noises and articulations, it is incredibly easy to craft a performance that feels much more like someone playing an actual guitar.
You can create your own riffs with the built-in sequencer and you can make the guitar tone all your own by employing the extensive FX chains and amp sims included in the package. There’s enough depth here to allow you to use Artefakt Guitar across numerous and very different genres and styles.
And with a specific ‘Humanize’ control, you can really tweak the sounds and performance to your specific needs.
Italian Grand XL for Montage/M/MODX/MODX+ by ITB Music
Gorgeous, sampled piano libraries are pretty common these days and, if you own a Yamaha Montage or MODX, you will already have some fine piano content built in at the factory. But for discerning piano players, sometimes you just have to have your own specific choice.
And this is where third-party piano libraries come in. You can pick your own library from almost any piano ever made, with a myriad microphone positions, multi-samples, velocities, pedal positions and mechanical ambience samples that complete the sonic deception of playing the real thing.
Originally released for the Montage and MODX back in 2020, ITB Music’s Italian Grand was already a favourite among many owners of the Yamaha range of workstation-style keyboards. Capturing a 10′ Fazioli concert grand, it delivered some truly wonderful recreations.
Now we have Italian Grand XL. This builds upon the previous iteration to deliver increased dynamic range and allows for a wider range of touch sensitivity over the original. Each key was sampled in six velocity layers with no sustain looping, each note being allowed to ring out fully on its own.
The expanded memory available in the Montage M and MODX+ allowed for this increase in size and uses 768MB of 44.1/16bit stereo samples, across 614 keybanks. Those six velocity layers also include note-off samples and there are 21 performances and one live set included.
Italian Grand XL is available to pre-order now and is scheduled for release on February 14th, 2025. People who place their orders now will receive a lite version to experiment with before the full version arrives.
The library is available for €29.95, €10 off in their sale, so snap this up quickly.
Classic PPG Waveterm Samples
There’s been somewhat of a resurgence in interest in wavetable synthesizers in the last few years, particularly the OG grand-daddy of them all, the PPG Wave. Whilst Waldorf have carries the wavetable torch for some time now, there’s still a hankering for “ol’ blue’.
So much so that a bunch of ex-Sequential guys got together and created a company to launch their first foray into the synth market with the 3rd Wave from Groove Synthesis. This was a PPG Wave on steroids, taking everything we loved about the original, replicating it perfectly and then going beyond.
Then Behringer decided they wanted a piece of the action and released the Behringer Wave. Instead of adding the same level of new features that the 3rd Wave did, Behringer decided to focus on nailing the original’s looks, sound and user experience of these vintage synths.
But both of these added functionality that, back in the day, would have required you to buy some extra PPG hardware, such as the legendary WaveTerm. This allowed you to bring in and manipulate your own transients (aka samples) to use as either wavetables or samples in their own right.
And thanks to the synthesizer legend Paula Maddox, and Behringer Wave collaborator Hermann Seib, there is quite a repository of PPG and Waveterm sounds and samples available online for you to play with, regardless of whether you own a Behringer Wave, 3rd Wave or not.
Paula’s site, which has been around for almost as long as the internet itself is packed with history, demos and links galore to access a wealth of Wave-related content. One of the best bits is the WaveTerm Library. Using a program created by Hermann, Paula was able to extract direct conversions of the WaveTerm disks and convert them to .WAV files.
Whilst the total library is a mere 10.1MB, there are hundreds of disks and thousands of sounds for you to download and experiment with in your instrument of choice. The most fun will be had when using these in one of the PPG-inspired machines. They’ll also work with Waldorf’s own PPG Wave 3.V plugin.
By the way, Waldorf, if you read this… could you PLEASE update the plugin to, at the very least, feature a new, larger and easier to use GUI? Pretty please?
You can find the WaveTerm library here, and Paula’s PPG homepage here.
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