Like so many plugins before it, Adam Szabo’s Viper is designed to offer the sonic characteristics of a hardware synth in software. It’s been in development for some time, and offers multiple oscillator types with user waveforms, sync, frequency modulation, ring modulation, 8-voice unison, filter saturation, filter routings, a mod matrix, effects, an arpeggiator and more.
Viper comes billed as a performance synth, and promises to create analogue-style pads, basses and leads. You’ll hear a certain amount of randomisation in the sounds to mimic the behaviour of electronic components.
The synth’s code has been optimised to use as little CPU as possible but not at the expense of sound quality. Any parts of the synth that aren’t being used are switched off automatically to further reduce processor load. There’s also a ‘smoothing’ algorithm to eliminate ‘steppiness’ between values and give a more polished sound.
Find out more on the Adam Szabo website, where a demo can be downloaded. Viper is available for PC as a 32-bit VST plugin, with a 64-bit version to follow. It seems that there are no plans for a Mac version, however.
