This is the first in a new series of articles I'll be doing on various freeware audio programs, which I plan to do once per month in place of a second "Obscure Audio Software" article. Some of these may be fairly obscure too, but I'm not making that a requirement here.
For the first one of these, I'd like to cover the Mono/Fury virtual instrument plug-in from Full Bucket Music. It is available as a Windows VSTi (32 and 64 bit) or a Mac VSTi or AU.
As you may have guessed, this is an emulation of the classic Korg Mono/Poly analog synth. I've never played the real thing, so I can't comment on the accuracy, but I definitely like the way it sounds. Feature-wise, it seems to be pretty much true to the original. It does add a few tweaks, like a sync-to-host feature for the arpeggiator.
For those not familiar with the synth this is based on, this is a 4-oscillator (plus noise) virtual analog synth with a 4-pole lowpass filter, 2 ADSR envelopes (one for the VCA and one for the filter that can also serve other modulation purposes), 2 LFO's, and some cool stuff like oscillator cross-modulation and hard sync. It includes an arpeggiator, and can be played monophonically with all four oscillators stacked, or in quadrophonic mode, where each oscillator can play its own note. Note that this is not true polyphony, because all four of these "voices" share the same filter and VCA.
You can hear a short demo I put together using nothing but Mono/Fury for all of the sounds below (no effects or post-processing). There's an fx sound using the cross-mod, a bass sequence using the stacked mono mode, and a few percussion sounds made with filter self-oscillation (plus noise in the case of the "snare"):
https://www.fstateaudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/monofurydemo.wav
I really love this plug-in for bass and lead sounds, particularly with a little distortion (although I admittedly like pretty much everything with at least a little distortion). It seems quite good at being nasty. The cross-mod is also nice for fx-type sounds. The author also has some other really cool stuff available, but we'll save those for later articles.
Website: http://music.fullbucket.de/vst.html
Thanks for reading! Feel free to comment below.