Deepsounds has introduced Junit, a Juno-style patch editor for the Novation Circuit & Circuit Tracks.
Junit provides a straightforward interface to the Circuit’s synth engine, emulating the look of the Roland Juno 60.
Here’s what they say about it:
“Junit brings back the fun, ease, and sound of the legendary synthesizer!
Create fat basses, cutting leads, classic keys and plucks or warm pads with the signature PWM modulation and the legendary chorus. Perfectly suited for synthwave, ambient, retro pop, melodic techno and house.”
The editor is built on TouchOSC, and is available for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac and Windows.
Slate + Ash, Bristol-based sound design studio – has announced the release of a new Kontakt instrument. Primaries / Woods is the next edition in the company’s Primaries series, inaugurated in 2024 with the release of Primaries / Strings.
Primaries / Woods uses woodwind instruments as the raw materials for expressive sound design.
Where that instrument focused on solo string performances across bass, cello, viola and violin, Primaries / Woods is based on the sounds of the woodwind family, packing more than a hundred recordings of bassoon, clarinet, flute, oboe and saxophone into an instrument that the company says is designed to “capture the physical exchange between player and instrument”, exploring solo woodwinds as “a fundamental colour in the orchestral spectrum. From guttural vibrations to fragile overtones, every texture is distilled into tactile breathing matter”.
Primaries / Woods’ library of multisampled articulations is accessible via the same sophisticated sound engine found in Primaries / Strings, which is capable of layering two sound sources together with independent controls for tuning, envelopes, filtering, and key-zone.
Each layer can be processed with a selection of fifteen macro effects, with delay, reverb, compression, tremolo, bitcrusher, pitch-shifter and more on offer, along with a master effects section on the output that features EQ, compression and a lo-fi processor. Effects can be modulated via the onboard LFOs or MIDI CC.
Primaries / Woods’ spatial mixer allows you to blend multiple reamped versions of its sample library together across an XY pad; recordings have been reamped in the Funkhaus echo chamber in Berlin and Real World Studios’ Wood Room, and processed via an EMT 140 plate reverb and Bricasti M7.
Primaries / Woods is equipped with four input modules, spanning a multi-mode arpeggiator, scale-aware harmony generator, and a randomizer that introduces octave shifts, tuning variations and panning into the mix. There’s also a tape simulator onboard that can be used to time-stretch and pitch-shift sound sources.
Though Primaries / Woods uses woodwind instruments as a sound source, Slate + Ash has creatively processed its source material to create a broad range of synthetic textures that sound worlds away from the original recordings, and the instruments’ 200 sound-designed presets offer everything from “warm pads and subtle underscore layers” to “arpeggiated sequences, synthetic pulses and granular textures”.
As was the case with Primaries / Strings, you’re able to drop your own samples into the instrument’s sound engine, effectively giving you a versatile and powerful sampler with which to manipulate and rework your own sounds.
Here’s the Preset Demo:
Primaries / Woods is currently priced at £149 and can be purchased with Primaries / Strings for a discounted price of £349. The instrument runs in Native Instruments Kontakt 7.10.7 or higher, or in the free Kontakt Player.
Developer Matthew Fecher (AudioKit Pro) shared this introduction to Super J8, a new iOS software synth that’s designed to sound like a $30,000 Roland Jupiter-8.
Fecher says that Super J8 was developed in part with the use of ‘ethical AI machine learning’. The oscillators were trained by recording hours of output from a vintage Jupiter-8. The mountains of data gathered by analyzing the hardware synth ‘powers’ the oscillators in the app, creating analog-like variations in the tuning and other attributes that he says make the synth feel ‘alive’.
Other highlights include Oscillator Sync, Cross-Modulation, 2x Oversampling, True Per-Voice Poly Unison, PWM, Analog Voice Modeling, Analog Panning, Envelope Polarity, and Single-Note Polyphony.
Topics covered in the video include:
0:00 Intro, New Features!
1:32 2x Oversampling
1:56 True Per-Voice Unison, 64 Voices!
3:40 Single Note Polyphony
4:07 Analog Saturation
4:49 Oscillator Sync
5:48 PWM
7:16 Mixer Panel
7:31 Cross Mod (X-Mod)
9:31 Per-Voice Panning
10:19 Main Panel
13:38 Bonus LFOs
14:14 Envelope Panel (ADSR)
16:00 FX Panel
16:23 Easter Egg?!
17:16 WiP Presets Demo
19:23 Exclusive Presets (500+ Included!)
Features:
New sound engine with advanced DSP
650+ presets included (more to come)
True Poly Unison with unison start sync
64 voices – like a Jupiter-64! Play 8 notes with 8-voice unison.
Raw, gritty Oscillator Sync
J8-style cross-modulation plus frequency tracker
Per-Voice Analog Panning
Single Note Polyphony for notes & unison stacks
2x oversampling for more analog-style lows and highs
PWM engine modeled after vintage hardware behavior
FX: Reverb based on Sean Costello’s code (Valhalla plugins Plug-ins), Analog Tape Delay, Chorus, Crush, and more.
3 LFOs, over 60+ possible destinations. LFOs can even modify other LFOs.
Dual Assignable Touch Pads, manipulate FX in real time
