Catalogue

No. Every instrument is its own plugin in VST3, AU and AAX, so it loads in your DAW like other plugins. It runs on macOS 10.13 or newer, Windows 10 or newer, 64-bit.

Most of the patches, and no time limit at all. The sound mutes for a moment now and then, presets and settings reset when you reopen the session, and a few patches are held back. What is left is enough to tell you whether an instrument is for you.

A trial licence is for testing only. To release music you made with the plugin, you need a full licence.

Lekko is the usual first one, and about as fragile as pianos get.

If you’d rather start somewhere less obvious, I’d take the Helenko celesta or the Blisko strings, because they give you textures that are hard to find elsewhere. Bardzo is a grand that sounds about as not-grand as possible, which shouldn’t surprise you: the original instrument inspired the Klavins Una Corda. The one I think everybody should own is Nisko. I wanted an 808-deep bottom end that behaves like something a person played, and that’s what this is. You feel it in your chest.

Because nothing here is synthesised. Every note, every dynamic layer and every round robin is a recording of the real instrument. The size on disk is the instrument itself. A round robin means the same key was sampled several times over, so no two presses of it sound identical. The exact figure is on each product page.

The one that sparks your imagination. Start with Lekko or Bardzo. If they’re not what you’re after, there’s plenty of choice elsewhere.

A modelled plugin recreates the circuit in maths, from schematics and tolerances. It is the approach most companies take. Schematics and published component figures are enough to build from, so the hardware never has to be in the room. Those figures say little about how a unit actually sounds.

Felt effects are sampled: built from recordings of the hardware itself, taken apart and rebuilt into a plugin. What your track runs through is the captured response of the unit, not a description of it.

You can read more about this approach here.

More than a typical algorithmic plugin. The saturation is sampled deeply enough to break up the way the hardware does, and that depth is what costs the CPU. Use the trial to hear how it runs on your machine. If you stack a lot of instances, freeze the tracks.

Kolor and Kolor Mikro are built for mixing, and are at home on the mix bus too. Brut belongs on individual tracks more often. It will sit on the mix bus if you keep the drive down, especially on the default RCA OP-6 setting.

Anything that takes VST3, AU or AAX: Ableton, Logic, Cubase, Pro Tools, FL Studio, Studio One, Reaper, Reason. They run on macOS 10.13 or newer, Windows 10 or newer, 64-bit.