Full Bucket Music Six-Traq, a free Sequential Circuits Six-Trak Synthesizer emulation

Full Bucket Music Six-Traq is a new free Synthesizer plugin that emulates the vintage Sequential Circuits Six-Trak analog Synthesizer. 

Many synthesizers came onto the market in the 1980s. One of the pioneers was Dave Smith of Sequential Circuits. From 1980 to 87, he released a good amount of electronic instruments. Many of them were the first to have MIDI, which was innovative at the time.

The Six-Trak from 1984 is not as legendary as the Prophet 5 from the late 70s, but it was the first multi-timbral Synthesizer with MIDI. Special for the Six-Trak was its one-knob user interface. This vintage synth is now available as a free emulation from Full Bucket Music—no worries with better operation. 

Full Bucket Music Six-Traq

Six-Traq is a free Synthesizer plugin that accurately emulates the classic Sequential Circuits Six-Trak Synthesizer from 1984. Like the previous plugins, it is written in native C++ for high performance and low consumption. I can confirm that. The FBM plugins are all very resource-saving. 

Six-Traq offers the same feature set as the original synth. It’s a six-part multi-timbral Synthesizer. Unlike the original Dave Smith synth, Full Bucket Music has extended the original six voices to 96 polyphony voices with more multi-modes. So, you get a polyphonic synth for each of the six parts with 16 voices or all voices in unison.

16 Voice Poly Synth Per Part

Each voice has a single oscillator per voice, three waveforms (sawtooth, triangle, variable width), and an additional white noise generator.

Then, it has a classic self-resonating four-pole lowpass filter with cutoff and resonance controls. Plus, it has various modulation options, including cross-mod (osc – mod) 

Three ADSR envelopes (oscillator, filter, amplifier) are available with an invert functionality. The amp envelope also offers velocity control. There is also a two-wave LFO per voice with frequency and amount control.

Further, each part of the Full Bucket Music Six-Traq includes an onboard sequencer and arpeggiator with settings for the clock, track volume, sync, and speed. It also supports dynamic micro-tuning via MTS-ESP by ODDSound.

Björn from Full Bucket Music has also made the user interface much more user-friendly by revealing all parameters. But if you want the authentic Six-Trak charm, he also included the one-knob control panel. 

An excellent addition is the support of SysEx import and export from/to the hardware. This way, you can import hardware patches or use it as an editor for your sounds.

First Impression

Another excellent free synth from Björn Arlt, aka Full Bucket Music. I particularly welcome that he always uses synths that haven’t been emulated 100 times. Like the ARP Omni 2, Korg Lambda, and others. 

Full Bucket Music Six-Traq is now available for free download. It runs as a VST2, VST3, CLAP, AU, and AAX plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows. If you enjoy Björn’s excellent development, please consider donating something to its website. 

More information here: Full Bucket Music 

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