Bought myself a new 303 emu (vst)... Spectralhead Audio Silverbox
The sound is pretty good i reckon and i love the way you can do the sequencing all in one window with slides and accents. Superb layout, that's what really made the difference in my eyes. I don't think laying down cool 303 patterns can get any easier in vst land, tbh. It's just pure fun and as a bonus it has some different distortion on board. There's an autumn discount as well:
Spectralhead Audio Silverbox
http://www.spectralhead.com/silverbox.php
http://www.spectralhead.com/img/silverbox.jpg
.: Features :. - Authentic monophonic analog bassline emulation
- Easy-to-use interface
- Oscillator with saw/square waveforms
- 18 dB/oct. analog modeled multimode filter, LP/BP/HP/peak modes
- Sequencer with piano roll, accent & slide
- External sequencer mode
- Variable pattern length (1-16)
- Advanced randomize functions
- 16x oversampled distortion with minimum aliasing (soft, hard clipping, soft foldback, hard foldback)
- Optimized DSP code using SIMD instructions
- Customizable MIDI CC automation
- Sequencer MIDI out
- Custom skinnable user interface
.: Overview :. What is SilverBox?
SilverBox is an authentic digital emulation of the world's most renowned and famous analog bass line machine. It's square oscillator accurately models the oscillator of this 80s analog beast, giving a spectrally different square wave for different notes. The in-built sequencer has the traditional behaviour with accents and slides. The accent circuit is probably the most difficult to faithfully reproduce virtually, and most emulations simply fail to reproduce the typical barking sound.
Accent and filter Most emphasis was on creating the best accent emulation possible, because no virtual plugin fulfilled our expectations. The same applies to the filter - most emulators don't reproduce the typical resonance character thoroughout the entire frequency range at all.
Why is it different? The most striking difference with SilverBox and most other emulators (besides sound) is the ease of use. You see the entire pattern instantly, no need to cycle through steps to see what's going on in the pattern. With dedicated rows for gate, up, down, accent and slide, you can alter patterns easily and quickly. The piano roll gives you an overview of the melody in a familiar way. The pattern functions give you an intuitive way of quickly and easily delete, shift, or randomize rows independently. The random functions allow you to set a random probability for each row, which allows you to create many similar random patterns at a click of button. Unlike the original which is difficult to program, SilverBox is really easy and fun to use.
Sound quality The second most important aspect was the sound quality. SilverBox uses oversampling where necessary, to minimize annoying high-frequency aliasing artifacts at internal distortion, typical with virtual instruments. With its sophisticated 16x oversampled in-built distortion engine, SilverBox can drive your basslines with an amazing +80 dB into four types of saturation, with nearly no digital aliasing artifacts. That means, if your host runs at 44.1 kHz, then SilverBox processes sound internally at 705.6 kHz!
"Silverbox sounds amazingly good. It definitely has the 303 sound and it doesn't sound artificial like some virtual instruments do."
Alexander Arsov, Wusik Magazine
Efficiency Despite the extreme oversampling, SilverBox runs lightning fast on your SSE-enabled processor. Designed to utilize modern CPUs' efficient instruction sets, SilverBox can process 4 samples at once! This gives you a lightweight plug-in which allows you more instances, and leaves you more horsepower for the other tracks and plugins.
Extras In addition to the standard features, SilverBox has a bunch of extras as well. There are additional four unique filter modes with bandpass, highpass and peak responses, at the same time retaining the typical resonance character. The MIDI out feature allows you to drive another software of hardware synth with the SilverBox internal sequencer. And the noise feature adds some hiss, to make the sound less digital and sterile.
