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Recently, I was lucky enough to attend Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene Live concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. It has been 31 years since this groundbreaking album was released and several million album sales later, JMJ has come full circle by taking it out on the road. It was great to see him in the relative intimacy of a venue like the Albert Hall but, it was even more remarkable to see his live set. A laptop and all the latest MIDI and audio equipment just isn't for him - instead he and three colleagues were surrounded by the gear which made Oxygene itself. ARPs, Moogs, classic Roland analogue synths, even VCS3s - it was all there, sounding great and all magically drifting in and out of tune. And what took centre stage? The Eminent 310 string machine, of course, without which Oxygene, and hundreds of other albums, would sound very different.

G-String

Unlike some synth sounds, there seems to be an insatiable appetite for string sounds, and retro ones at that. With modern workstation technology, hybrid sample and synthesis string patches sound more life-like than ever and that's before you even consider the plethora of gigantic string sample libraries. However, the slow phasing, pad-like sound of classic instruments like the Eminent 310, the ARP Omni, Quartet and the Solina have never gone away but it's taken until now for these (and many others) to rub shoulders within a single plug-in environment. GForce Software have responded to the call and now offer Virtual String Machine alongside their other impressive 'remakes', including the MiniMonsta, the ImpOSCar and M-Tron.

Installation is straightforward. On the bundled DVD, you'll find the main program which goes in your Apps folder (or wherever you want to install it), alongside a drag-and-drop contents file, which bundles VSM's many sounds to a single archived file. You can put this 2.5GB file anywhere (including an external drive) and, on first boot up, you're asked to locate it, but it remembers it from then on.

So, what's inside VSM? Well, 17 classic string machines, lovingly resampled, for starters, complete with a set of synthesizer controls like envelopes, LFOs and effects to let you shape them. However, the intuitive part is that you can create your own hybrid patches by layering two sound sources together. If you want an Xpander in the bottom two octaves, plus an Eminent 310 solo at the top, no problem. VSM lets you pick a 'red' sound for the first layer and a 'green' one for the second. Setting their key ranges is as simple as clicking on the appropriate layer and dragging the slider above the keyboard to reflect the keys you want. Of course, sounds can overlap too, so creating hybrid 'monster' patches is perfectly possible (check out the DVD).

Editing and shaping

Getting hold of a sound to hone it into the string machine of your dreams is straightforward. As you might have guessed, editing a particular layer is as simple as clicking on it, whereupon the edit parameters will colour code - click the upper red layer and the controls will turn red. Clicking the lower layer turns everything green though VSM handily lets you edit both sounds as one by clicking the Link button, which turns parameters blue. The edit window is dominated by the envelopes, of which there are two - one for the filter and another for the amp. To the left of these, an LFO can be introduced to add vibrato. The speed and amount can be edited separately and a Sync button clocks the rate to the tempo of your track. The resonant filter section offers High-, Low- and Band-pass types that, if anything, could afford to be a touch sterner. Both filter and output volume can be affected by velocity, with independent dials controlling how much of one or both of these you'd like.

To the right of these dials, you'll find the onboard Phaser and Ensemble effects, without which many classic string synthesizers might have been consigned to the dustbin of time. The Phaser is comprehensive, with dials to control speed, depth, centre frequency and resonance, while the effect can be sync'ed to tempo via a dedicated button. The Ensemble plug-in is
capable of some wonderful detune and while the manual cautions against using both effects too dramatically at the same time, some pretty special effects can be achieved doing precisely this.

Conclusion

VSM sounds wonderful and is a joy to use. You can easily load one of the many dedicated programs, or create your own by loading your 'machine' of choice into one or both layers. I'm so excited that someone has decided to celebrate classic string synths in such a comprehensive way and that it should be GForce, with their impressive track record, is better still. There's plenty of opportunity to be a purist and stick with single instruments and plenty more to 'mess with history' and create generation-spanning hybrid sounds. Either way, if you're looking for retro strings aplenty, call off the dogs - the search is over.