Xen-Arts has announced the release of IVOR2, a free two-oscillator subtractive, FM, XFM and RM software synthesizer, suitable for microtonal music design and performances.
IVOR2 is a major update, having a significant evolution and refinement of the original synthesizer. The result is a versatile virtual analog synthesizer with frequency and ring modulation, pulse-width modulation, filters and other microtonal/spectralism specific features. IVOR2 is capable of complex, expressive and evolving timbres.
I had it for a quick test drive, and firstly I can say it sound amazing: full, precious and accurate, just like a commercial product. The interface looks intimidating, somehow outdated, and not too friendly in terms of aspect and structure. With a professional & modern GUI, this plugin would be perfect. For the beginning, you will rely on presets, which by the way they are in number of 118 (courtesy of Xen-Arts and Sevish). Its sound is suitable for ambient, microtonal music, spectral music, electronica, chillout, but also EDM.
IVOR2 comes with a brand new MOD-GEN section, a generalized hybrid Modulation Source Generator, which includes an envelope generator that can be switched between an ADSR or a Graphic Envelope Generator, and an LFO that can be switched to run at audio-rate: the ARO. When the MOD-GEN LFOs are switched to the ARO mode, they are capable of generating additional sideband spectra in the signal, resulting in complex, expressive and evolving timbres. Additionally, the frequency ratios of each ARO may be configured by loading a Partials File (TXT), which enables basic tuning and timbre correlations of the generated sideband spectra, especially where sine-waves are being used as the modulating waveform.
Like its predecessor, IVOR2 is light and CPU friendly: on a computer with Intel i5 processor and 8GB of RAM, I loaded a bunch of instances of the plugin, and I run them simultaneously, without affecting the system performances.
IVOR2 is available now for free download on Xen-Arts’ website (5.6MB compressed ZIP file). The synthesizer is an VST (VST2) instrument plugin, 32-bit only, but it loads in 64-bit DAW’s via jBridge or similar applications designed for bridging VST plugins in Windows.
More info:
IVOR2 free synthesizer instrument plugin by Xen-Arts
