Cherry Audio has announced the launch of its Novachord + Solovox collection – two virtual instruments which “pay homage to the trailblazers of the synthesizer world”.
These new offerings emulate two vintage classics from Hammond which are now hard to come by, and hefty on the price tag. Mark Barton, an award-winning developer and DSP designer, reached out to Cherry Audio with the idea to revive the two vintage synths, using virtual synthesis as opposed to sampling.
The 1939 Hammond Novachord contained 163 vacuum tubes and over 1,000 custom capacitors, and chances are you’ve heard it before on songs such as We’ll Meet Again by Vera Lynn.
Cherry Audio’s virtual version features 32 polyphonic voices, and has the Brilliant, Deep, and Full tone settings of the original. There are seven Attack/Decay/Sustain envelope options, adjustable depth vibrato, and an integrated reverb effect with Room and Hall algorithms, plus speaker emulation.
The 1940 Solovox on the other hand, was a small monophonic mini keyboard instrument attached beneath a piano to augment it with organ-type lead voices. It had 18 vacuum tubes and produced a range of string, woodwind, and organ sounds widely used in music into the 1960s.
The “faithful” virtual analogue emulation of the instrument features combinable Bass, Tenor, Contralto, and Soprano switches, as well as Deep, and Brilliant tone settings, adjustable glide and fixed-rate vibrato, a mute control to filter harmonics from the oscillator voice, and an integrated reverb effect, also with Room algorithm and speaker emulation.
Check them out below:
Cherry Audio’s first release of 2023, a recreation of the legendary Roland Jupiter-6 analogue polysynth first released in 1983, earned a 10/10 from Music Tech due to its affordability and wide palette of sounds.
There is an introductory price for the Novachord + Solovox package at $39 (list price $59). Find out more at CherryAudio.com.
