Full Bucket Music: Tricent mk III

German programmer and software engineer Björn Arlt began building VST plugins under the name Full Bucket Effects in 2010. Being a musician, and a synth enthusiast from a young age, he was drawn to analysing and building software synths. He now offers both synth emulations and effects as freeware through his website.

Tricent is a software synthesizer plugin, and is a simulation of KORG’s 1982 classic, the Trident mk II. The plugin takes care to honour the peculiarities of the original hardware, and features ‘Synthesizer’, ‘Brass’, and ‘String’ sections, as well as a ‘Flanger’ effect and the ‘Delay Vibrato’ and ‘Wheels’ section. Both the Trident and Tricent feature two modes for assigning the eight voices. In Mode 1 the engine tries to assign any new note to a new voice so that the other voices are not cut off. Mode 2 is suitable for solo play because here the engine will assign the next note to the same voice as before, if only one note is played at a time. This prevents potential muddying of the sound on longer release times.

The Tricent mk III expands on the original concept by offering some tweaks for further flexibility. Here you can switch from the original eight voices to sixty-four voices of polyphony. This makes the largest difference when playing pads and arpeggios. The original Trident was a mono machine, but Tricent’s Flanger and String ensemble effects can be switched to stereo mode, and the Brass and the Strings sections can be detuned individually. The parameters for ensemble speed, modulation amount, as well as vibrato delay time can also be controlled via the DAW. Finally, the Tricent offers a dedicated Output section where you can adjust the stereo panorama and the response to velocity for each of the three sections.

Features:

• Synthesizer, Brass, and Strings sections
• 8 or 64 voice polyphony
• Flanger effect
• Individual stereo outputs for the three sections

Tweaks…

• Supports MTS-ESP by ODDSound dynamic micro-tuning
• Resizable user interface (not N version)
• All parameters can be controlled by MIDI controllers
• Plugin supports Windows (32 bit and 64 bit) and macOS (64 bit)