Vital is a new spectral warping wavetable synth plugin that’s been in development for some time. Promising to “give new life to wavetables,” it’s now available, and the great news is that you can use it in its basic form for free.
The spectral warping features enable you to play with a waveform’s harmonics - stretch, shift smear and skew them to create all kinds of different timbres and sounds. You can turn your own samples into wavetables, create them from scratch using the wavetable editor, or generate them from text.
The oscillators themselves are said to have a low noise floor and almost no aliasing, with optimisations keeping them light on your CPU. There’s a drag-and-drop stereo modulation system, along with MPE support. Vital looks the part, too, with animated controls running at 60fps.
All in all, it’s a pretty interesting proposition, particularly as you can try the basic version - which comes with 75 presets and 25 wavetables - for free. The $25 Plus version gives you 250 presets and 70 wavetables, while the $80 Pro version offers more than 400 presets and 150 wavetables, plus unlimited text-to-wavetable generation, prioritised support and an exclusive Discord perk.
You can also subscribe for $5 a month to get all of this plus first access to new features and new plugins.
Vital runs on PC, Mac and Linux and you can find out more at the Vital Audio website.
Vital features
- High quality wavetable oscillators with frequency warping and wave warping
- Efficient unison
- Two routable voice filters with several analog and digital models, each with multiple continuous blending modes
- Audio-rate modulation so you can create clean drum transients and frequency modulate filter cutoff
- Stereo-splitable LFOs with custom and editable shapes
- Keytracked LFO settings
- Modulatable envelopes with custom curves
- Modulation remapping so you can customize the shape of every modulation
- Custom sample source
- Random modulation sources like Perlin, Lorenz Attractor, S&H and Sine Interpolation, each with stereo options
- Eight routable effects including a multiband compressor, multi-mode phaser and 16 voice chorus
- MPE support
