Cherry Audio Harmonia is the company’s third original Synthesizer plugin and this release explores additive synthesis with samples.
The emulation world around Arturia, Softube… has got strong competition in recent years from Cherry Audio. The still-young company launched a range of excellent-sounding and very affordable emulations of synth classics. Among other things, a CS-80 on steroids, a polyphonic MS-20, and more.
Cherry Audio can also do original synths. With Dreamsynth and Sines, they showed synth plugins with original concepts. Sines, for example, combines East and West Coast elements in a monstrous UI. Today, they released the third original synth with Harmonia.
Cherry Audio Harmonia
Like Sines, Harmonia combines different ideas into a new virtual instrument. The Harmonia core consists of two-sample-based oscillators that are immersed in additive synthesis techniques.
According to Cherry Audio, “each oscillator can simultaneously produce up to eight pitches, individually tuned to a harmonic series or semitones. The volume for each pitch harmonic can be fixed or dynamic, and Harmonia’s unique interpolated harmonic scanning enables dramatic sweeps and melodious sequences through a single modulatable slider.” That’s where additive synth memories come up.
Harmonia ships with hundreds of sampled waveforms recorded from various synths, traditional instruments, voices, and more. Many are in stereo and you can also import custom samples, allowing to dive super deep into the dual audio path engine.
The oscillator engine can generate morphing and sequencer-like timbres thanks to the harmonic and semitone modes with various built-in presets. Additionally, you can create and save custom Harmonic presets.
Stereo Filtering, Effects, And Modulation
Then, both oscillators run into a stereo multimode filter, including lowpass (24 dB/oct, 18 dB/oct, 12 dB/oct), and 6 dB/oct), highpass (12 dB/oct slope), bandpass (12 dB/oct slope), and notch.
To refine your sounds, Harmonia features a multi-effects section with 17 studio-quality algorithms, including distortions, modulations, echoes, and reverbs.
Modulation side, you get four tempo-syncable polyphonic LFOs with ten waveforms, mono/polyphonic modes, one-shot and retrigger functions. There are also click-and-drag filters and amp ADSR envelopes. All this is managed by an easy-to-use 8-slot modulation matrix with 19 sources and 80 destinations.
And yes, Harmonia is a monophonic and up to 16-voice polyphonic Synthesizer with user-selectable bend depth, octave shift, and note glide. Plus, it ships with over 350 professionally designed presets for instant inspiring fun.
Other Features
- Standalone virtual instrument and plug-in versions
- Complete MIDI control and DAW automation for all controls, with easy-to-use MIDI Learn and mapping
- Cherry Audio’s popular Focus zoom-in feature, as well as standard UI zoom and resize via drag
- Complete documentation available directly online from the instrument or in downloadable PDF format
- User-adjustable oversampling control
First Impression
A great new plugin that lets you explore more exotic sounds than you wouldn’t get from classic synths. The plugin looks very intuitive, especially on additive synthesis. If you want to explore sounds like in the Kawai K5000S, Synclavier, you should take a closer look at this release.
Cherry Audio Harmonia is available now for $49 instead of $69. It runs as a VST, VST3, AU, and AAX plugin on macOS (Intel + native Apple Silicon) and Windows
More information here: Cherry Audio
Available at my partner
I’m not too impressed by the presets, and I’d redesign the GUI, and a little polyphony is tough on the CPU especially with oversampling.
But…
…once you start digging in to sound design with this it can get really wild. Like a pair of harmonic oscillators (which is already a great starting point, especially with some distortion after it), but with sample playback instead of just sine waves, and the partials can be tuned to other harmonics or intervals, and you can modulate a lot of stuff at audio rate.
I’ve been having a blast with it. 😀 I like some of the lofi samples it comes with too.