Virtual Instrument

The latest offerings in Ueberschall's Liquid Instruments series focus on vocals, aiming to provide you with a flexible band of personal backing vocalists via a front-end based on Celemony's Melodyne.

Digidesign's march into MIDI sequencing territory continues with the launch of a plug-in emulating classic electric piano sounds.

Is Native Instrument's new stand-alone soft synth as big as they say it is?

Giga Virtual Instrument gives you Tascam's Giga sampling engine as a plug-in for the first time.

Can an 8 Megabyte plug-in really compete with the new generation of multi-Gigabyte sampled grand pianos?

This new software instrument majors on lively and evocative loops and phrases that can be flexibly combined to create convincing world-music atmospheres.

Old synths never die, they get reproduced as virtual instruments. So it is with Waldorf's Micro Q, which forms the heart of Terratec's impressive wavetable-based soft synth.

Five new evocative sampled Chinese instruments in virtual instrument form at a seriously low price.

We find out how well Steinberg's new take on the virtual orchestra conducts itself...

There have been some famous twin-guitar line-ups in rock history and, even if you can't strum a note, you can now have the virtual equivalent — both of these software instruments will play on time and in tune, and won't want a solo in every song! But are they both equally good?

Gary Garritan's powerfully expressive solo violin instrument features some impressive technical innovations. Will it create a new generation of virtual Paganinis?

Can this in-depth software emulation of the ARP 2600 improve on Arturia's existing 2600V?

Working with musical loops is now a well-established part of the musical mainstream. Could you do with One more tool to get the job done?

Cakewalk's latest virtual instrument takes traditional subtractive synthesis as its starting point, but offers a degree of flexibility that is unimaginable in any hardware instrument.

Not content with adding a huge raft of improvements to their already comprehensive Emulator X soft sampler, Emu have also removed the need to use it with their own soundcards, so now everyone can get in on the fun.

Like the analogue modelling of AAS's Tassman but don't need its complexity or fancy its price much? The far more affordable Ultra Analog could be right up your street...

The Vienna Symphonic Library are well known for their amazingly detailed collections of orchestral sounds, and now they're providing them as virtual instruments. Will this take the VSL concept to a new audience, or is it a step too far?

Manufacturers have sought to provide expressive computer-based simulations of real instruments by releasing ever larger and more detailed sample libraries. But whatever happened to the idea of modelling instruments using synthesis techniques? Arturia haven't forgotten...

General MIDI synths are rarely glamorous, but there's no reason why they should not sound as good as more professional alternatives — that, at least, is the thinking behind NI's Bandstand soft synth.

The new version of Steinberg's virtual sound module brings more and better instruments, without sacrificing convenience or ease of use.

Most recent electric piano virtual instruments have been sample-based, but in Lounge Lizard, AAS continue to fly the flag for their physical modelling technology; version 3 offers an improved fork model, plus modelled electromagnetic and electrostatic pickups...