Thursday, November 18, 2010

u-he Announces "Diva". (Sort of.)

Urs Heckman of u-he software made an interesting announcement in this thread on KVR recently. Apparently he had been messing around with modeling different modules from well-loved vintage synths. Here's what he had to say:

"So what is it?

At the moment it is a little synthesizer plugin which I use to test and develop various modules. It's a ugly, it's grey and it's a nuissance to use. What it does though, it contains various models of selected modules from selected synthesizers that recently pile up in my place. Over the months whenever I bought or borrowed a synth, I have immediately started to analyse oscillators, filters and envelopes. From that I have often built my own versions, based on circuit schematics, hearing and measurements. Just to see if it's doable and how they'd fit in Zebra, ACE and or Berlin Modular. Other times I just mangled some stuff in Zebra to find out how it's done.

Slowly arised the notion that my testing environment would make a great product all by itself: Simple, retro, beautiful - if only a proper user interface was plopped around it, and if maybe all those geeky knobs would vanish. And if I ever managed to throw all those algorithms in the same project folder.

Anyhow. Today the name came like an apparition to Howie and me:

DIVA - Dinosaur Impersonating Virtual Analogue "

To be totally clear, however, Heckman indicated that this product isn't coming any time soon, he merely wanted to call dibs on the name.

1 comment:

Solidtrax said...

We made a little demo with 14 instances of the DIVA plugin, no external FX, only a limiter on the master bus. We hope this does showcase some of the sounds you can make with this beauty of a synth plugin!

http://soundcloud.com/solidtrax/solidtrax-diva