Behringer Vintage

Behringer Vintage ·

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Behringer

After last week’s surprise release of the MS-5, Behringer Vintage was the super surprise none of us were expecting! A free vintage synth plugin for everyone!

You have to hand it to Behringer. They do like to pull the rug out from under our feet every now and again. Last week, after much silence on their socials, they dropped the MS-5, their take on the Roland SH-5.

Today, without a word of warning, they release what appears to be the first of a series of free plugins. I say ‘Series’ because the icon for Behringer Vintage bears the title ‘Synth Suite’. What else could it mean?

Behringer Vintage, according to their blurb, is an original virtual synthesizer with powerful oscillators, filters and LFOs modelled on the analog circuitry of vintage synthesizers. They don’t say which, specifically. And that doesn’t really matter.

I guess many people will hazard a guess at a certain Californian piece of hardware from the late 70s/early 80s simply because of the wood effect on the UI and the heatsink on the rear. This plugin must get really hot!

What it does have though is a highly commendable user interface with a nice, clear display and neatly laid out controls. There’s nothing overtly fancy here and Vintage is all the better for it. It’s also a completely scalable UI. Just drag the corner and fit it to your screen. It looks mightily impressive on my Ultra Wide display!

Under The Hood of Behringer Vintage

Behringer Vintage contains to oscillators with a hard sync function and with the typical range of waveforms; sine, square and saw with a noise and sub-oscillator thrown in for good measure. PWM of the square wave is also possible.

It’s also got a pretty handy pair of filters too. 12/24db, switchable between low, high and bandpass along with notch and formant modes. Both these filters can be overdriven too. Seems like they’ve very much thought this through. Filters can also be routed in series or parallel. Nice!

There are separate ADSR envelope generators and the dual LFOs appear to have a significant amount of grunt and capability.

Behringer Vintage: It’s FREE!!

Have I already mentioned it’s free? Behringer’s version of free means you can have it in exchange for signing up to their website and giving them your email. I don’t know many people who would object to that as it’s pretty much common practice these days.

However, at the time of going to press, the Behringer website seems to be struggling to keep up with demand as I’ve been sat here for the last hour trying to get my licence code and all I get is a red-dotted spinning wheel!

Hopefully this will resolve itself soon but you can still download and install the plugin while you wait. And while we wait, we can contemplate if this plugin, and subsequent ones, might be part of the free Behringer DAW they’ve been promising us.

Exciting times indeed!

More Information

Behringer Vintage is available now by visiting the Behringer Vintage website. It is available for both Windows 10+ and macOS 10.13+ and as a VST3 and AU plugin. A standalone version is also included.

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