You should buy Tal-Uno-Lx immidiately! It is the funniest Juno 60 emulation ever! I have tested Jupi and Juno and ended up with Juno on almost all basses and leads. It's weird but Juno is very solid for basses. Also Voice Calibration is EPIC thing in all TAL synths. Just setup Round Robin for voices, Open Voice Calibration windows, put Random slider to 12:00 for that vintage vibe or to 15:00 for (almost) crazy randomness.

Thank you very much for this! I do a blind test and VST sounds better for my taste. Grittier and meatier...

Great new synthesizer plugin by Patrick^TAL. We compared it also - like some others here - to our Alpha Juno-2 and a Alpha Juno-1 from a friend. Because time is eventually changing and eventually killing your hardware instrument, they all three sounded a bit different.

The chorus is difficult to nail we think, and is noisy as hell on the hardware. You could also see this noise as free dither.

But not everyone likes noise so then definitely have a go with the TAL-Pha demo, since it is a well crafted and sounding plugin.

The good part is that TAL-Pha comes loads of new features that we highlighted here:



Perhaps that could be of some use. Forgive our playing

Yeah, the alpha has that Juno boost too

As i said, a lot of the parameters was off, like LFO speed, resonance amount (the VST can go into much more resonance at 100%, but it is stated in the manual)

So i think it is reasonable to expect all the other parameters were off a little, and it can have tremendous differences in sound. So i definitely think it can be tweaked closer. The one that i could not match very easily is the resonance when the LP filter is open 60-80%, and the envelope action. Every time i shortened the envelope to match the sound, i lost some body somewhere else, etc. Unfortunately the ENV on the Alpha is a very complex one, and if you tweak one parameter, it modifies the timings of the others.
Other easilly noticeable difference was the thickness of the chorus, but again, it might be just a different lfo speed.

Actually i'm sending my sysex to the developer later.

Cool. Thanks again.

Those digital JUNO envs are quite weird generally, IME. The decay/release phases are not quite fully exponential like a CV through a capacitor is (a la JUNO-60); they start off quite linear and seem to curve a bit later in the cycle...

Perhaps the HW reso, then, is tapering off when the filter sweeps upwards (or getting stronger when the filter drops)? Seems likely to be another cause for substantial difference in timbre.

I was trying to not be picky about the resonant edge in the examples, given that it's a stated divergence from the HW, and also I don't mind if it sounds different, as long as it sounds good by it's own merits, that's all that matters of course.

Interesting!

Perhaps you'd be kind enough to let us know if your feelings happen to change somewhere down the line

Cheers

It's already changed a lot since my first impressions. It's a lot closer than i remembered. I always try to evaluate plugins on how they sound instead of how they compare, but i failed my rule this time.

I am 100% certain that these are not differences that make the VST sound "worse". Besides the Alpha has a few tricks up it's sleeve that no other synth has, so i totally recommend it to anyone. Not to mention that you can recall a session, have 280 instances, automate parameters.. those nitpicks will disappear quickly.

I still have that "software feeling" while using it though, which i don't get from the Softube synths for example.
The same thing happened when i used the Legend vs the Model 72. Both sounded indistinguishable from he HW on audio comparisons. But somehow in use, the Model 72 just kills it. This might be some esoteric thing, like GUI, or even just the behaviour of the knobs when using the mouse.

For example the Roland cloud emulations have stepped 0-127 controls on every parameter. That alone can cripple the analog feel of an emulation in use, no matter how authentic they sound.

guys this things oozes alpha juno, don't get lost in the last 0,1% please on some graph, make awesome riffs with it!

Dont forget this thing is 40 years old or so, big chance some entropy has settled in your old HW
When I compared the REdominator with my overhauled alpha it was almost there, and even that was 5% orso.

I dont see the point in max reso sweeping at the edge of disintegration and comparing the amount of ms or even nanasec the ENV differs from the HW.
It is really a good alpha emu with a lot of goodies/extras thrown into.

OFC there will be a difference to a HW model and even from HW unit to HW unit. It is not that this emu from TAL wil not be fine tuned later on. But I am happy already as it is now.

Nobody is gonna rip your Maxi from the turntable and throw it out if it would come to light you used an TAL emu, really :D

I am freaking playing this one the last few days and it is ****ing great.

Well said and exactly our point, you always will have small differences.

Just going deeper on the TAL-Pha's extended features and finding much to love here indeed. For example the hard sync mod on osc2, takes it toward JX-territory And the 'vt' page is lots of fun!

It's 256 (0-indexed) with Roland Cloud, but the steps are not discrete. I have the 707/727 open on the same track I'm testing TAL-Pha on in front of me, if I switch off the GUI and shift-drag the native DAW faders I get quite a bit more resolution between those integer points. I believe the spiel is/was that they are MIDI 2.0 - ready, in that regard.

EDIT: Roland Cloud bi-polar PB control suggests a total range from -8192/+8191 "under the hood".

No worries, I didn't see any graphs, just heard some audio comparisons while demoing. As an audio software developer and synth nerd, my interest in the gritty details is my prerogative. I'm jamming sick riffs with it as well, of course...

The synth is younger than me and I am not quite yet 40, so please be careful with those age estimations, heh!

This sounds amazing! I heard a demo on my YouTube feed and was curious. Tested it and was blown away by the vibe and life this VST has. I have a lot of analog synths in my studio and IMO this has an uncannily similar vibe. it is very rare i say that of a VST emulation... I have owned a Juno 106 and a Juno 6 and played a few Juno 60 s. Honestly I am over their sound, too overused. But this has a vibe all of it s own! very happy with this purchase

Hmm well since Softube Model 84 is a Juno 106 while the Tal is a 60, I guess it wouldn't really be overkill to have both...

And fresh out of the oven:

rsp

Mac installer still has 1.0.3

I'm having the time of my life with this thing.

I haven't had this much fun messing about with a synth in a long time.

Going to look into the TAL Sampler for resampling as was mentioned here.

It's fantastic IMO. Well worth a demo.

2nd comparison with the reference hardware unit.
This is on the latest version with the updated filter.

Yep.

I sent my sysex to Patrick last afternoon , and he already made an update. He sent me videos comparing to my Seq Bass patch, and it was sounding damn identical LOL.

I'm officially convinced now :D

I'll edit my first post to not bias people reading this thread.

Oh this is fantastic news.
Thanks for bringing it to his attention and helping solve the issue.
rsp

Excellent, bought the plugin today.

No, I agree, there's something special about the Softube synths. They feel slightly noisier and darker in the upper midrange, especially in regards to the filter resonance.

I have been using the demo, but tbh, I am not impressed.

I like that I can drag out audio from Cubase directly into it, but tbh doing much with it, its not responding how i'd expect.

Can't even setup filter envelopes properly , maybe a demo restriction ?

I tried Halion too, that's even worse, who designs these GUI's. Halion was annoying ,its spread out too much.

Tbh Kontakt will be better, but I absolutely HATE the fact after 7 versions of Kontakt, you still cannot drag audio from the playlist in Cubase directly into Kontakt. I mean NI have a word with yourselves. This should have been an option with V1 or 2.

Anyway, I am now going to search around for a decent enough sampler to resample the stuff I get outta Tal Pha. I am loving this synth tbh .

Sorry to hear you're not liking TAL Sampler so far. I love it. It's not meant to compete with HALion or Kontakt. It's an old-school production workflow with a modern twist. The resampler section alone is full retro approach, that's one of its joys.

TAL Sampler along with TAL Drum are my favorite of his plugins. Takes me right back to my classic workflows, very straightforward, fast, creative, no fluff.

I also love HALion BTW, but that's a different kind of animal. It really shines with sound design workflows, the engine is extremely capable, you can do pretty much anything with it. HALion along with UVI Falcon are my favorites of that category. Kontakt is at the very bottom for me, I no longer use it unless absolutely necessary for some library that I have.

As for TAL PHA, I haven't bought it yet, I have so many VIs I just don't know when I'll use it. I'm still going through some BF purchases I made a couple of months ago. However, I really like it and I'm right on the edge of getting it. I have a lot of nostalgia for the MKS-50, so I might jump in before the promo ends.

BTW, apologies if I missed this, but when does the promo discount end?

I just discovered TAL Drum and now am wondering where it has been my whole life. After decades of Battery, this is the sound I have been looking for. TAL seems like a really cool company.

I made absolutely loads of tunes with TAL-Tube, TAL-Dub, and Battery 3 loaded with my home-made drum samples, back in the day. They were pretty much the only plugins I had (and good old Lexicon Pantheon, heh), and I used to write new tunes almost every night with them. Halcyon days...

Whoever is discovering TAL for the first time is in for quite a treat!

If you like TAL-Drum, don't skip on TAL-DAC...

The magic happens when tuning the voices. Well done.

Sure, but in the HW unit there is no such function available. And it still sounds magic. I demoed the latest version last night, the clean filter type sounds best and the closest to the HW. It's 95% there, which is amazing! Never before I found a SW synth sounding so close to their HW counterpart. Talking about analog ones. Well done Patrick

I'll continue to demo it, and hopefully i'll get on with it better, but it seems a bit temperamental to me.

But it allows drag and drop in Cubase which Kontakt doesnt.

Asked Patrick^TAL. Probably by the end of this month - perhaps a bit longer.

Patrick just posted an update to his Tal-Pha αJuno2 emulation.

Change log:

Version 1.1.1 / 23.02.2024

• Color theme file import/export.
• Fixed LFO sync not working.
• PW LFO (improved sound, more authentic behavior).
• Fixed wrong delay sync delay time text introduced with previous version.
• Minor fixes.

https://tal-software.com/products/tal-pha