Analog Superabundance - Vital presets
This is a preset bank that I released on Nov 8, 2024 for the free Vital wavetable synthesizer plugin. I also created custom wavetables for this project, which were all sampled from my Prophet 10 synthesizer. Consisting of 40 presets and 40 wavetables, this bank is mostly focused on polysynth/synth keys and pads patches, as well as a good selection of leads, basses, and fx.
Presets & Wavetables
Vital is a free wavetable synthesizer (very similar to Serum) developed by Matt Tytel. As such, it offers a great selection of wavetables in its factory presets and that you can use to create your own presets. You can also import your own wavetables, and for this project, I thought it would be really interesting to create my own wavetables. I decided that for this preset bank, I wanted to create my own wavetables by sampling one of my hardware synthesizers, and I chose my Prophet 10.
I also wanted to create a fairly unique set of wavetables, so I decided to experiment with saturation/distortion and pitch in the process. For many wavetables, I'd run my Prophet through various distortion pedals or plugin and crank the gain. Perhaps start off with lots of distortion, and blend in a 5th harmonic. Use tape emulation plugins to add some saturation and pitch wobble into the table. Or, of course, route a filter sweep through a hot distortion. Fun things like that!
In creating the presets, I gave myself some “guidelines” to adhere to. As someone who was a musician before delving into music production and sound design, I very much appreciate when an instrument can be played in a very expressive way, offering options for tonal control and variety. So, this is something I strove to achieve with these presets. My “guidelines” were that I wanted to use all 4 Macro controls available in Vital and have them perform some sort of sonic change - and to use this same principle with the ModWheel as well. With a suitable MIDI controller mapped properly, each preset then has 5 effective tactile controls to manipulate the sound as one is playing the plugin. In the demo video at the bottom of this page, you’ll see that I try to demonstrate the functionality of each Macro and ModWheel for each preset.
As a result of the wavetables having a lot of saturation “baked” into their tones (though, spoiler, I did create some clean, basic wavetables for more flexibility with the preset design), I’d say that a lot of the presets are fairly coloured sounds that work well for ambient, lofi, hip-hop, chillhop (maybe even hyperpop?). That said, I’d invite you to take a listen for yourself and decide how versatile they might be!
You can check out the full preset pack on my Gumroad here.
Keep scrolling below to watch a video in which I demonstrate all 40 presets I created in this preset bank.