Falcon 2 €349

UVI

The world of the hardware synth has boomed in recent years. You can now pick up a decent hardware machine for much less cash than it would have cost you a decade ago, and analogue has, of course, made a big comeback, in both cheaper all-in-one and modular formats. It was pleasing, then, to see more cutting-edge plugin synths released in 2019 than ever before. Almost as a reaction to that hardware, soft synths are now more feature-packed, cost aware and prettier than ever, so much so that we’ve decided to dedicate an entire category to them.

They have also made headlines in 2019. The much-anticipated Massive X could have been better – and indeed is getting better – while all around it, synths like Zone from newcomers Audiaire have been upping the ante in terms of both looks and sound; 2019 has definitely been a year of synths matching beauty with brawn.

Our winner, though, is something of a hidden gem, or at the very least, certainly not one to hog those headlines. To those lucky users ‘in the know’, as it were, UVI’s Falcon is pretty much the ultimate synth. The plugin utilises the same architecture behind the company’s powerful Workstation to produce a modular system that can become pretty much whatever you want it to be, with multiple synthesis and sampling modes, a vast high-quality effects, and a ton of performance devices. There are nine oscillators for synthesis alone, including virtual analogue, wavetable, phase distortion, FM and additive type, and physical modelling. Add massive modulation features and over 90 effects and you have a synth – or synths – that can deliver any sounds you want.

The best part of Falcon though, is that this much-awaited version 2 is free to lucky v1 users and, while fairly pricey for the rest of us, it is money well spent. We concluded: “it is without doubt one of the most potent and inspiring instruments money can buy.”

267 » 10/10