WORLD OF MUSIC ; PORTABLE KEYBOARD - Latest Portable Music Keyboards, Synthesizers and Music News

Prime For Yound Adults Trial

“It’s the original synth on steroids”: GForce AXXESS, a vintage ARP AXXE emulation with a 21st century blade.

GForce delivering some big news to unwrap for Christmas. The company has announced its new soft synth, AXXESS. This is an emulation of a 1975 vintage synth, with 21st century extras, and very much the younger sibling of the company’s award-winning Oddity 3.

Vintage Synth describes the original 1975 ARP AXXE as ‘a budget-proof version of the popular Odyssey’ which we all agree with, because it could be seen as a single-oscillator version of that instrument.

Of course, GForce’s new version adds some solid, modern extras, all while retaining the original’s sonic character, a new/old balance the company has so brilliantly achieved with products like the award-winning Oddity 3 and Minimonsta2.

The original synth boasted a simple but classic oscillator/filter/amplifier left-to-right signal flow, and AXXESS retains that, but extra features mean you can either enjoy that original sound, or take it into completely new realms should you wish.

This is largely thanks to GForce’s X-Modifier technology, which adds dedicated LFOs and ADSRs to most of the synth’s parameters. This huge extra modulation potential means that “AXXESS is the AXXE sound on steroids”, according to GForce, but the extras don’t end there.

Other new features include a sub-oscillator, an arpeggiator and a 16-step sequencer (see screen above) plus effects in the form of distortion, stereo delay and reverb. There’s a Vintage knob to bring in more of the classic analogue imperfections we used to moan about back in the day, and a Pan Spread option for extra wide sounds.

There are 350 presets included, said to be ideal for synth-pop, dance, hip-hop, cinematic and prog rock, and programmed by the likes of Zardonic, GEOsynths, Christian Laffitte, Richard Veenstra and Ramon Kerstens (K/V).

GForce Axxess demo by Crazik:

AXXESS is available now with intro price of £33 + tax (normally £66 +tax). It’s available in standalone, AU, AAX, VST and VST3 formats, and you can get more info from the GForce website.

Prime For Yound Adults Trial

Rexing Product Page

Prime For Yound Adults Trial

A new free Rhodes plugin for you to download… but it’s not an electric piano. V-Pan pays homage to the iconic vibrato stereo panning effect and is free until the end of January.

It has become a bit of a tradition for developers to give us free music software during the festive season, but this year software industry are truly pampering us.

We’ve already mentioned about UVI’s free Noctua Cinematic Soundscape synthesizer, Native Instruments’ free Glaze plugin, and also Cherry Audio’s free SEM synth module. That’s your synths and vocals sorted for Christmas, then, so how about some classic stereo vibrato courtesy of Rhodes?

It’s been quite a year for the revamped Rhodes. The company is on a mission to deliver all sorts of classic electric piano goodness and announced its top-end MK8 a while back. But 2023 has seen it make significant ‘in-rhodes’, with a software version of the MK8 landing back in January.

This new V-Pan limited-time freebie is essentially the Vari-Pan section from Rhodes’ V-RACK multi-effects plug-in, and also emulates the Vari-Pan effect found on the hardware Rhodes MK8.

You can adjust V-Pan’s rate to create varied synth and ring mod effects. There’s a Depth control for added drama, and Waveform Slew and Smooth controls to customise the panning waveshape. A BPM Sync option keeps everything in check, so you can go wild with rhythmic effects.

V-Pan will cost $39.95/£29.95/€34.95 after 31 January, but until then you can grab it for free from the Rhodes website.

Prime For Yound Adults Trial

Rexing Product Page

Prime For Yound Adults Trial

Manecolabs has introduced Pikoloops, a new Eurorack module, based on the Pikocore loop mangler from InfiniteDigits.

Pikoloops adds 5V compatible clock in and out, quarter note trigger output and Eurorack compatible output level.

Features:

• A lo-fi music mangler based on the Raspberry Pi Pico
• Holds 8 minutes of 8-bit 33 kHz monophonic samples.
• Tempo-synced with a selectable BPM between 60 and 300, with samples mangled by beat-synced effects (stutter, retrig, gate, tunneling).
• Real-time effects, including a resonant filter, timestretching, volume, and wavefolding.
• 128-step sequencer with recording/playback
• Saved and loaded via EEPROM for instant patch recall.
• Able to load custom firmware, new samples, all through USB-C.
• Sync-compatible with Eurorack devices.

Pikoloops is available for $219.

Prime For Yound Adults Trial

Rexing Product Page