Full Bucket Music: FB-3300

German programmer and software engineer Björn Arlt began building VST plugins under the name Full Bucket Effects in 2010. Being a musician, and a synth enthusiast from a young age, he was drawn to analysing and building software synths. He now offers both synth emulations and effects as freeware through his website.

The FB-3300 is a software instrument that is modelled on the KORG PS-3300 Polyphonic Synthesizer from 1977. This plugin aims to provide a close approximation of the original hardware rather than an extended, modernised version. As such, it does not react to velocity, and the monophonic/paraphonic modulation options mirror that of the PS-3300.

The FB-3300 plugin provides three synthesizer blocks that run in parallel to each other. Each block has 64 voices, and each voice features a band-limited Signal Generator (SG), a 2-pole Lowpass filter (LP), an Envelope Modulator (EM), and two Modulation Generators (MG 1+2). The mix of all voices is sent into a single Resonators section consisting of three bandpass filters/resonators, followed by an Amplitude Modulation section and a Voltage Controlled Amplifier (VCA). Finally, the output of the three blocks is summed up in a final VCA. For modulation purposes the FB-3300 has a Sample & Hold unit, an additional General Envelope Generator (GEG), and two Voltage Processors (VP 1+2).

Features:

• Close emulation of behaviour and all controls of the original hardware
• Three independent polyphonic synthesizer blocks
• Band-limited oscillators, classic two-pole lowpass filters
• Resonators section plus two Modulation Generators per bank
• Additional Sample & Hold and paraphonic Envelope Generator
• Semi-modular
• Micro-tuning option
• Additional tweaks
• MIDI Learn – all parameters can be controlled by MIDI CC
• Plugin supports Windows (32 bit and 64 bit) and macOS (64 bit)