Madrona Labs Aalto and Kaivo are still to this day two of our favorite soft synths and we’re excited to see that the Seattle company has a new product coming out next week.
Virta (a Finnish word for ‘stream’ or ‘current’) is a MIDI or OSC-controllable effect plugin that runs in the effects chain of any digital audio workstation.
Think of it as a patchable, sound-controlled synthesis toolbox, that turns vocals or other instruments into rich and complex new sounds.
In their words, Virta “lets sound designers and musicians easily make new sounds that are controlled fluidly by voice or other instruments. Virta is unique in the world of software synthesizers in combining a low-latency sound analysis engine with a patchable collection of modules.
In Virta, sound input is analyzed in real time to generate pitch, noisiness, and brightness signals. These signals are sent through an easy-to-use patcher module to control other sound modules including:
• an LFO, synchronizable to host tempo
• two oscillators, operable in either classic waveshaping or vosim (vocal synthesis) modes
• a formants module with four different types of vocoder
• a pitch-shifter / delay with analog-modelled saturation
• an envelope, gate, and two pannable outputs with limiter
Virta is designed around vocal analysis, but the input doesn’t have to be vocals. Other instrument sounds can work well, and even putting drums in can result in strange new melodic loops.”
Pricing & Availability
Virta is available starting on Monday March 28 from http://madronalabs.com. A single-user license for both Mac OS and Windows is $89.

