Full Bucket Music: WhispAir

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.

Winner of the KVR Audio Developer Challenge 2021, WhispAir is a soft-synth ‘Performance Synthesizer’ that features three wavetable oscillators, where each oscillator holds one of 40 wavetables (37 built-in and 3 user tables). Oscillator 1 offers additional Amplitude Modulation by oscillator 2 and/or oscillator 3, while the other two oscillators allow for Hard Sync and Linear Frequency modulation. The three parameters Master Tune (± 100 cents), Portamento (Portamento time) and Pitch Bend (± 12 notes) of the Pitch section affect all oscillators. 

Common Oscillator Parameters:

• On/Off switch
• Wavetable selection and modulation
• Octave (16’, 8’, 4’, and 2’), Pitch (± 12 notes), and Tune (± 100 cents)
• Frequency modulation (± 48 notes) and Amplitude modulation
• Start Phase (start of the current waveform; 0° to 360°)

Note that one can select whether the oscillator should run continuously or restart on the next note event. Specific Parameters To Oscillator 1 Oscillator 1 allows for Amplitude Modulation (AM) by the two other oscillators; the amount of AM can be set individually. Furthermore it is possible to modulate the overall AM amount by any of the available modulation sources

Features:

• All parameters on one single page
• Three flexible wavetable oscillators
• Classic Full Bucket stereo filter
• Three modulation and four envelope generators
• Unison mode and Chorus
• TUN/SCL/KBL micro-tuning file import
• Supports MTS-ESP by ODDSound dynamic micro-tuning
• Resizable user interface (not N version)
• MIDI Learn – all parameters can be controlled by MIDI CC
• Plugin supports Windows and macOS (32 bit and 64 bit)