Dreamy Pads and Classic Synth Sounds & Patches

This week we have a dollop of lush pads for a bargain soft synth and some superb emulations of classic synthesizers for their modern-day hardware counterparts. Read on for more synth sounds and patches.

The Pad Machine for Cherry Audio’s Dreamsynth

I’ve featured James’ work here before. Since then, he’s been busy beavering away on yet another great bank of sounds. This time he’s focusing on the brilliant Dreamsynth from Cherry Audio. My colleague, Robin Vincent, looked at the Dreamsynth back in November of 2022 and had this to say about it…

It offers a surprising amount of tonal scope wrapped up in a familiar interface and is just dense enough to be challenging. Ultimately, Dreamsynth is a fun machine and is very of the moment I think. For $39 is going to find itself in everyone’s DAW.

I couldn’t agree more and with this new bank of synthesizer sounds and patches, Dreamsynth continues to go from strength to strength. The pack contains 50 pad sounds (the clue is in the title!). Each of these have been deeply programmed to fully exploit Dreamsynth’s extensive capabilities.

Patches include splits, multi-timbral sounds, layers and morphable patches that make use of the modulation wheel to blend between the sounds.

As always, James’ patches come at a bargain price of just £10 GBP. They can be ordered by sending the money to his PayPal account using his email address [email protected]. Make sure you include a note stating ‘Pad Machine’. James endeavours to have the sounds sent to you within the hour!

SynthTaxi Presets for Arturia PolyBrute: CS-80, JUNO 106 and OB-Xa

Every now and again, whilst scouring the internet, you stumble on little gold mines. SynthTaxi is one such seam of golden synth goodness! There I was, looking for some information on Arturia’s flagship, the PolyBrute, and Google returned a link to some free PolyBrute presets.

As with anyone else, the mere mention of the word ‘free’ immediately piques my interest. And boy did I hit pay dirt! Here was not one, but four free banks of synth sounds and patches for the PolyBrute. Not only that, but they were recreations of sounds from two classic vintage analogue synths; the Roland JUNO-106 and Oberheim OB-Xa.

SynthTaxi, aka ‘John’ (for I know not his surname) has painstakingly recreated the factory presets from these vintage machines on the PolyBrute. Now, whilst I don’t have an OB-Xa or JUNO-106 here to compare them to, they do get pretty darned close to other similar patches on other recreations I have.

Tackling a Giant

However, after grabbing the freebies, all of which are offered as free/pay what you want, I noticed a bank of patches that emulated the glorious king of analog polys, the Yamaha CS-80. To recreate this behemoth on the PolyBrute is surely a foolish undertaking, I hear you cry! But John has done a pretty decent job of recreating not only the presets, but other patches too.

The pack includes 33 patches that recreate the Tone Selector presets. As the PolyBrute has a brilliant morphing function, John has recreated the patch on Morph A and then created a complementary patch on Morph B.

Thirteen of the patches in this bank are John’s attempt at recreating famous uses of the CS-80. This selection covers sounds as heard in the likes of Billie Jean, Africa, Dr. Who, Born in the USA and the obvious Blade Runner sounds. Needless to say, he hits the mark quite well.

Ultimate Patches JD-Xi 2024 Patch Collection

Ultimate Patches have been making sound sets for hardware synths for a few years now. Their catalogue includes patches for the likes of the KORG Minilogue, ASM Hydrasynth, Arturia MiniBrute and most of Roland’s Boutique range.

Their latest collection focuses on the Roland JD-Xi and comes in a variety of options. First up, there’s a 15 patch mini-bank taster. You can download this for free to check out some of the sounds. You can then buy individual collections of 100 patches for just $14.99 each.

But the best value pack of them all is the super value bundle. This puts all three volumes together for just $29.99. It’s a no brainer, really! And if you already bought their previous JD-Xi bundle, Ultimate Patches will offer you $10 instant cashback!

All you need to install these patches is a JD-Xi (duh!) and a compatible computer. Installation instructions are included, along with a printable patch list.

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