OSC 33: Charlatan

Charlatan by BlauKraut Engineering
is a freeware polyphonic, subtractive virtual analog (VA) synth whose design focuses on sound quality and easy usability. The design philosophy was to provide a feature set just large enough to cover a wide range of sounds rather than an infinite number of parameters and modulation options cluttering the user interface and distracting from the creative process. 

That said, Charlatan's synthesis architecture is flexible enough to create all kinds of sounds, from conventional classic leads, basses and pads to weird blips and noises. While making no compromises about sound quality, the algorithms have been optimized for efficient CPU usage making Charlatan well suited as a "bread and butter" synth even in projects with a large number of plug-in instances.

Feature Summary:

- 2 oscillators with triangle, sawtooth, rectangle and noise waveforms.

- Oscillator pulse-width modulation (PWM) and slew rate modulation (morphing between triangle and sawtooth).

- Oscillator hard synchronization and ring modulation.

- 2 ADSR envelope generators.

- 1 LFO.

- 3 filter types emulating nonlinear characteristics of classic hardware: 4-pole (24 db/oct) and 2-pole (12 db/oct) - lowpass, bandpass.

- 3 voice modes: Monophonic with retriggering, Monophonic Legato and 8-voice Polyphonic.

- Low CPU usage.

- 100% coded in C++.

- Native 64-bit support.