"I always lusted after a Technos Acxel from 1984, but they didn't really exist. There were only about 4 ever made and those barely made it into public view. But there were pictures of them, and I had my imagination.
So, 30 years later, I made it myself, and then I made it better.
Every partial, hand-drawn.
Modeled after the Technos Acxel — a Quebec-built additive synthesizer from 1986-1992, with somewhere between 30 and 40 units ever made. Two engine slots share one wave bank, one Grapher, and one mod bus: Slot A is the Acxel's additive and sinusoidal resynthesis engine, Slot B is a wavetable machine, and you can run either or both at once.
AXCEL plugin GUI
- Acxel-accurate additive engine: up to 32 partials per voice, each independently addressable on the Grapher for amplitude, phase, and detune
"The Abstrakt Avalon was made to perfectly replicate everything in a vintage Roland TB-303, and add features like an additional mod envelope, more knobs for greater control, and excellent metal build quality. But they were rare, expensive on the secondary market, and hard to find. Some people have waited half a decade for delivery.
Until now.
Made by a complete 303 madman deep in a laboratory under strictest of top-secrecy and tightest guarded listening chambers, this digital version gives you everything you could ever want, then goes a little further with more programming modes, tweakable settings for slide/glide and resonance, Devil Fish mods, adds all the filter cartridges (even your own!) new colored skins, and the should-be-patentable EZ buttons. Also included for analog authenticity is the db-cell technology, adding pure analog noise modulation for non-repeatability where it counts; in vintage circuits. Best of all: it matches the hardware through rigorous test harnesses, and countless hours of listening. If it didn't sound authentic, it wouldn't get released.
"The bassline from @nineinchnails The Becoming has always haunted me. Originally done on a borrowed 'OberMoog' prototype [matrix note: see prior posts here], the original synth underwent massive engineering changes, management, and versioning until it finally became the OB-Mx, which was a "better" synth, but didn't quite sound the same. I know this, because I owned an OB-Mx.
Anyways, our Ober-Moog VST gets pretty close, and goes beyond. Plus, it's got 500+ presets, an EZ button for randomization, and Hand Of God for impossible automated modulation. Available now at store.denversynth.com
How close does this get?
I guess only TR can say for sure.
The synth that wasn't.
A 1:1 recreation of the Oberheim OB-Mx panel, voiced as the ‘Ober-Moog’ — the pre-production prototype Trent Reznor borrowed from Richard Bugg and used for the bassline of Nine Inch Nails’ The Becoming. Never officially released, barely documented, and rebuilt here from every source that exists, contested claims included.
- Full OB-Mx architecture: dual VCO per voice, MM-VCF and SEM-VCF in series or parallel, four-stage envelopes with free-run and repeat
- Voiced specifically as the Ober-Moog prototype, not a stock OB-Mx — the one unit with its own name, its own history, and no official spec sheet
- Unison/spread/detune matching the OB-Mx's card-based voice architecture, mono or up to full polyphony
- Modulation matrix covering breath, pressure, velocity, note number, wheel, and pedal across twelve assignable destinations
- Built from every documented source on the instrument, with the honest gaps left as gaps rather than guessed at
EZ button gets you into a usable patch in seconds; the panel underneath goes as deep as the original hardware did
A faithful emulation of a machine older than your dad's synth collection.
Four oscillators, a full patch bay, and a state-variable filter with an INPUT DRIVE stage that distorts inside its own resonant loop — the original's signature scream, modeled all the way down to the resonance itself breaking up under drive. Duophonic voice architecture, a MODULATOR that goes OFF → AM → RING, a sample & hold SAMPLER clocked off OSC 1, and enough patch points to make questionable routing decisions like it's still the Nixon administration. Patch it by hand for hours, or hit EZ to find something you wouldn't have thought of in a million years.
- Four oscillators — OSC 1 steps through triangle/saw/square/pulse/sine across HI/LO range, OSC 2–4 morph continuously via COLOR — feeding a duophonic voice architecture (KB1/KB2)
Zero-input mixer. DIY noise artist's playground.
A digital no-input mixer: four channels, two effect returns that are full mixer channels in their own right, db-cell running as the board's own noise floor, and a live patch bay — everything you hear starts as the board's own hiss going round a feedback loop until it finds a mode. CASCADE feeds each channel into the next, wrapping channel four back to channel one; CHEAP/SOLID decides how hard the shared power rail sags and lets every channel modulate every other one through it.
ZEROBOY plugin GUI
Four mixer channels, each with seven selectable circuit topologies and Mackie-style 3-band EQ, plus a CASCADE that feeds straight into the next channel — channel four wraps back to channel one
Reverb and delay aren't send effects — they're two more full mixer channels with their own gain, EQ, and aux sends, already wired into a two-node feedback loop with each other
"INFIDEL shown here put through its paces.
This is an intentionally non-musical demo to show the power and sound of INFIDEL. It gets loud. If you don't like it, good.
The point is, you've never heard a VST sound like this, ever.
What we make hasn't existed before.
So, stop chasing other people's sound, and make something that's your very own for a change.
With roughly 1/3rd of the available modules shown here, you can tweak until morning.
Just make sure you get some sleep sometimes!
"INFIDEL is a full modular synth built around one idea: every module runs its own cheap sign-magnitude DAC, at its own sample rate and bit depth, so the whole rack can sound exactly as broken as you want it to — on purpose. You don't have to earn that sound with a soldering iron or a twenty-minute boot sequence. Hit INIT FULL and you've got a working 47-module, 81-cable patch across four buses — lead, drone, texture, drums — before you've turned a single knob. Hit EZ on any module and it rolls a new setting that's checked to never go silent. Cables snap to the nearest free jack, drop onto an existing cable to insert a module inline, or swap one module for another while keeping every cable that matches by name. It's fast to get a sound out of, and it stays deep — a 53-module library and KEY-locked lo-fi clocking mean there's always one more place to take it.
- 53 user modules across Sources, Filters, Effects, Drums, Utilities and Logic — including an 8-model VCF BANK (CS-80, IR3109, SSM2044, CEM3320, SSM2040, STEINER, EMS DIODE, WASP) and effects ported from SpringBoy, BucketBoy, Thermion and Ironwall
- Every module runs its own cheap lo-fi DAC — RATE 1–32 kHz, BITS 2–16 — and KEY locks a module's clock to the last note played, so the grit tracks pitch instead of just buzzing underneath it
