Sonata VST Has Been Freed and Now It's Freeware

?Sonata is a VST soft-synth for strong single-shot leads and pads. The distinctive character of Sonata makes it adept at strings and lots of simple subtractive sounds, while also specializing in sparkly and glassy mallet sounds, deep basses, and warm and rich mid-range chromatic inventions.? This is how SoHa themselves describe Sonata. For those of you who have never seen Sonata at work... I must tell you that it is a simply brilliant piece of synth code, able to produce a wide variety of sounds a music composer/arranger could use at any time.

So far, Sonata hasn't been freeware... but hell yeah, these days are over! Still the exact reasons for Sonata becoming free are unknown; but who cares, as long as it comes free in its new, upgraded version?

Basically, the new Sonata comprises 2 sound generators working independently and each having its own specific parameters; while the first modulator operates the sound's immediate attack, the second one is used for the fundamental tone and both of them have their particular configurable ADSR.

The three global FX are reverb, cross-delay and distortion, pretty much what you'd actually meet in a knob-and-wire synth, also. Filtering of the generated tones is rather complex and it provides with a rich harmonic spectrum covering a very wide sound-area.

Due to the fact that Sonata is producing very dense and consistent notes via the two described generators and then shapes, combs and filters them in innumerable ways, the overall operation is rather CPU-hungry; even though the new Sonata is more than suitable for two hands-keyboard playing, such a thing would require some 2.5 GHz processor for a steady and trouble-free 20+ notes polyphony performance. A slower CPU, at 1.6 GHz for example should only run perfectly with some 8 notes simultaneously. The overall algorithms are mostly pure math hence the ?hungry? behavior and SoHa is actually speccing this in the official release data.

Nevertheless, Sonata is one VST tool you will want to download immediately after listening to the demo songs on the Sonata home page or on the John Malvey website. All, for the very alluring price of...zero cents! Thanx, SoHa!