New kid on the block, Robin Schmidt has released his first VSTi called Straightliner. Straightliner is a straight-lined subtractive synthesizer in a modern guise. You will find the well known building blocks of classic analog synthesizers (4 oscillators, a filter, 2 envelope generators) patched together in the traditional way.
Those building blocks themselves offer much more flexibility than commonly seen in subtractive (aka ’virtual analog’) synthesizers: Instead of relying on a set of fixed waveforms, Straightliner’s oscillators support loading of arbitrary (single cycle) audio files which may be even stereo.
In turn, the whole signal path is laid out in stereo. The standard ADSR model for envelopes is replaced by a flexible modulation generator which allows to define an arbitrary number of breakpoints. The heart of subtractive synthesizers is the filter, of course. In this department, Straightliner offers a multimode filter with various modes, among them the usual suspects like lowpass, highpass, bandpass, but also several other interesting types. The user interface of the synth focuses on visual editors instead of the commonly seen hardware oriented interfaces. These visual editors don’t just ’sketch’ the resulting curves but exactly represent what is being generated in a ’what you see is what you get’ manner.
Free demo is available at the website.