Planet Botch VST tonewheel/clonewheel emulators are a bit like buses. You wait eight years and then three come along at once. Yes, hot on the heels of an analogue K-type emulator, this is a double release. The post you’re reading finally sees both the promised flagship - The Seductress - and its supporting partner - The Clonewheel VXH - going public together.
THE SEDUCTRESS
The Seductress. Replicates the archetypal sound of a vintage, mechanical tonehweel organ with tube-driven rotary speaker.
The gruff yet smooth sound of a vintage, mechanical tonewheel organ has proved difficult to simulate in the digital domain, but the Seductress – modelled on the real world sounds of genuine tonewheel behemoths - comes incredibly close. Whether you want your VST environment to reverberate with the sounds of Jimmy Smith, Keith Emerson, Booker T, Cory Henry or, er… Viv Savage… you’ve come to the right place.
The Seductress recreates two sets of tonewheel drawbars, a tube-driven, dual-spin rotary speaker, scanner vibrato/chorus, authentic percussion, vintage-correct drawbar foldback, warm and smooth overdrive – all the ingredients that make up what most modern organists regard as “that sound”.
The distant predecessor of this plugin was the Classic H, which did the rounds some years back, finding its way onto magazine cover discs and the like. But the Seductress is a completely rebuilt instrument with far more sophisticated algorithms, a hugely superior rotary, and increased accuracy across every feature. Aside from the vastly improved sound, now fully synthesized rather than sample-based, here are some of the key improvements over the Classic H…
- Authentic drawbar foldback for a vintage tonewheel organ.
- Vintage-accurate percussion envelope, which re-triggers only when no other notes on the manual are held down.
- New, custom-matched DirtySwirl rotary cab emulator, which was designed from the ground up to achieve smooth, tube overdrive, excellent dual-rotor articulation, and the stressed feel of a loud cab even at low volume.
- Adjustable reverb.
- Selectable drawbar voicing, which gives access to rougher and more rocky waveforms if required. The drawbar voicing is set on the console via the DB WAVE button. When the light is on, you get a pure and smooth drawbar tone which is best for jazz. When the light is off, you get the beefier tone which works better on rock tracks.
- A SHIFT function, which raises the pitch of the lower manual by one octave on your input keyboard.
- Plus… Key-splitting for operation from a single input keyboard, much improved tone and volume scaling across the range, updated vibrato-chorus algorithm, drastic visual makeover… And a lot more.
But it’s really all about the sound. And that speaks for itself. This sound quality would be exceptionally high in a commercial release – let alone a free giveaway.
THE CLONEWHEEL VXH
The Clonewheel VXH - early 1990s H-type digital clonewheel organ.
I recently released the Clonewheel VXK, which emulates a twin-manual K-type analogue clonewheel organ. Those older clonewheels were easily distinguishable from real tonewheels – especially in the rotary speaker department. But this model – the Clonewheel VXH – replicates the sound of the game-changing early 1990s H-type digital clonewheel. Again, this new plugin is free, like all the VST stuff on Planet Botch.
Early digital clonewheels got much closer to the sound of a real tonewheel organ than their analogue predecessors. But they had an air of politeness that still distinguished them from the genuine mechanical article.
The Clonewheel VXH is visually packaged with a single manual, but like all of the current series of virtual organs from Planet Botch (and the original 1991 instrument on which it’s modelled), it offers flexible key-splitting.
The features are all on the console, and will be self-explanatory to anyone interested in classic electric organs.
I know you don’t want any more waffle, but please take note of the advice re the rotary speakers, which I’ve added to the Undercult page. It’s especially important if you mix down at high speed.
WARNING AND DISCLAIMER
These instruments have 32-bit architecture and were designed to operate at a sampling rate of 44.1K. They may not function correctly when used outside of their intended environment.
The VSTis were created with care, but they are home made, they have not been tested across a wide array of systems, they come with no guarantee whatsoever, and they are used entirely at your own risk. In downloading and/or using either or both of these VSTis, you agree that you, and only you, will be responsible for any negative issues the VSTis may cause.
To use a plugin, simply download the DLL file and place it into your VST plugins folder. Your host should then detect it and add it automatically.
Please note that these are DIRECT download links, and that hitting either link will actually start the download…
DOWNLOAD NOTICE
The software is no longer available from this, its original release venue. It was hotlinked here both via Google Sites hosting and via GitHub.
Google - "the cHaMpIoN oF aNtI-cEnSoRsHiP" - decided to censor everyone's files on Google Sites by deleting every last one of them. Except... when Google itself deletes shit, it's no longer called "censorship" - it's called "sunsetting". How cute.
Then Microsoft informed me it would lock me out of GitHub if I didn't cave to its bullshit "2FA" surveillance racket. So the GitHub has gone too. These were not the first hosting options I used for VST instruments on this blog, and there's a point beyond which one has to draw the line on repeatedly re-uploading and re-linking totally free contributions, on an unmonetised site.
