Full Bucket Music FB3 is a new free Kawai K3 additive/wavetable Synthesizer plugin emulation for macOS and Windows: it’s available now
German developer Björn Arlt has released many beautiful free Synthesizer plugins in recent years. My favorites are the FB-9999 (Korg FB-8000) and Fury-68 (Korg Poly 61).
Full Bucket Music’s latest development is the FB3, a new emulation of a famous hybrid Kawai Synthesizer.
Full Bucket Music FB3
FB3 is an authentic emulation of the Kawai K3 Synthesizer from 1986 for macOS and Windows.
The original Kawai K3 was a hybrid additive/wavetable Synthesizer with analog filters and envelopes. The software version emulates these specifications and has 64 voices of polyphony.
Like the original hardware, it features two oscillators, each with the original 32 digital waveforms. According to Björn, you can edit user waves just as you would on the original hardware. You can also link programs.
Alternatively, you can import additional waveforms into the plugin via a dedicated function on the user interface. You can adjust the oscillator wave, balance, and range. For oscillator 2, you also have dedicated fine and coarse controls.
Then, a low-pass resonant filter and high-pass filter let you shape the sound instantly. Two ADSR envelopes for the filter and amplifier are also onboard. The first can also be inverted.
Extra movement comes from a shapeable LFO with a delay function you can route to the VCF and VCA. Velocity and aftertouch are also onboard for both filter and amp.
The FB3 comes with the original sounds. Additionally, you can import Kawai K3 SysEx patches. It also supports ODDSound MTS-ESP for dynamic micro-tuning.
First Impression
The plugin sounds very nice. In a direct comparison, you can still hear the hardware, in my opinion, but the authenticity is already high. Now that the plugin is available, everyone can take a look.
Full Bucket Music FB3 is available soon as a free download. It will run as a VST, VST3, AU, CLAP, and AAX plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows.
More information here: Full Bucket Music
This is GOOD NEWS ^_^
The K3 was the pre-cursor to the K5000. It had a rudimentary utility to convert (re-synthesize) audio to the K3 equivalent of harmonic partials… similar to the K5K – audio to KA partials converter.
The K3 also had a nice analog filter bonus.
The precursor to the K5. The K5 was amazing in its day, but programming 64/128 enveloped partials, no filter and not even a simple on/off chorus were a turn-off. The much later K5000 lost its way, with too much tacked on. Of the three, the K3 (haha) has the most soul IMO.
K1 didn’t have filters. All the others did
You can edit User Waves just as you would on the original hardware. You can also link programs, although I have no idea if that would even be useful with a plug-in.
Full Bucket has some amazing stuff
There should be an additive partial editor…importing waves is uninspring imo.
I owned an original K3. I ended up using two or three sounds, but otherwise it was an average or less than average sounding module. This plugin lives up to that. Other Full Bucket stuff is really excellent, but this K3 reminded me why I never go back to this particular synth.
More additive synths and more Kawai VSTs is a good thing. Full Bucket deserves our worship for their awesome free synths. Doing the work of the gods bro.