Alex CVX’s free VK-2 patches
Free patches!
Some of you may have noticed them already in the forum, but you might just as well have missed them, so we thought we’d rather create an article to highlight the latest offering from our long-time contributor, Alex CVX: 52 free patches for Blamsoft and eXode’s Viking VK-2 Synthesizer. This excellent device was published less than 6 months ago and there aren’t many ReFills for it yet, so it’s a rather nice gift for us users.
What’s included?
Basses, Leads, Plucks, and More!
There are 2 ARPs, 24 Basses, 2 Chords, 6 FXs, 11 Leads, 1 Perc and 6 Plucks. Whoever follows Alex CVX’s YouTube channel will probably understand why there are so many bass patches: he is an expert on the subject, having produced a number of tutorials on how to create various bass types in Reason. So you’ll find a wealth of Moog, dubstep, growl, FM, Legendary basses and so on.
Great Recreations
The two Chords patches make good use of the Players to recreate two of DeadMau5’s signature sounds: the pluck from Polaris, and the pad from Saved. The rest is just as good, with screaming leads, emotional plucks and FXs that can be used as fillers in any EDM or synth-based song.
Note that most of these patches include Mod Wheel modulation and are normalized to -12dB, as is customary in the Reason world. They are provided at a default medium CPU setting. Obviously, you can just flip the CPU usage switch when you need to render your song at the highest settings.
Custom Init Patches
On top of those 52 patches, Alex provides his two replacement Init patches: one for the instrument itself, and one already combined. The difference between this Init and the default one is that this one is made to start a mono patch from scratch: no oscillators are set in the mixer; the amp input is set to the output of the first oscillator, bypassing the filters; the mod busses are undefined and, on the back of the device, the oscillator mode is set to Clean (as opposed to Mini in the default Init patch), Jitter and Drift are set to 0, and the Drive mode is set to CP-3 Positive (that is, clipping) instead of Saturation.
In short: it’s made to build patches brick by brick, first with the Oscs, then with the filters, then the envelopes, and so on, instead of changing a bit of this and a bit of that, as we all do. Bear in mind it’s harder to work this way, as it requires a solid understanding of sound design, but Alex knows what he’s doing!
Get the patches!
So, if you are the happy owner of a VK-2, jump to this thread to grab the file.
And, if you have missed them, don’t forget to check out Alex’s tutorials on YouTube.