About SUNFISH
Amazing sounds from an "alternate '80s"
SUNFISH is a fun and unique synth plugin capable of monstrous retro bass and glowing pads, with a tactile sound morpher to let you dial in amazing sounds fast.
Key Features
Here at remaincalm, we've spent years accreting a collection of half-functioning home organs, chiptune gear, toy noisemakers and 1970s "stringers". Gear that never really landed properly, decroded from decades in storage units and attics.
Those eBay specials are loaded with cool sounds.
Sunfish is what would have happened if a bunch of those evolutionary dead-ends were put together into an extremely weird flagship synth. Like a (more) demented Korg Trident.
Oh, and we stuck a big control surface in the middle, so you can dial in sounds without needing to understand what's going on. One "touch" panel and a few "category" buttons let you control 100+ synth parameters.
This is what it's not:
It doesn't sound like a Juno, or a Moog, or a Prophet. We didn't sand out all the fun quirks. The filters are weird; oscillator #3 is really weird.
You have enough normal synths already, probably. This is not a normal synth.
Features include:
- Sound generation modelled on obscure circuits from a lost era of synth history.
- The Morpher: a control surface that lets you dial in great sounds, without needing to get deep into synthesizer internals.
- Endlessly hand-tuned by actual humans, with decades of coding and production experience. We started work on this synth years ago, in the pre-slop era.
In more detail:
- 150+ presets, across many styles.
- Two unique oscillator engines: a 1970s divide-down engine for beautiful, expressive organic bass and strings, and a hotrodded 1980s low-res wavetable engine (inspired by the rare-as-heck Gleeman Pentaphonic).
- The wavetable engine is further enhanced by the ghost control, a per-voice, pre-VCA lo-fi pitched reverb, that adds shimmer to pads ... or explosive meltdowns to bass.
- Two filter engines: a subtractive engine with five unusual and crunchy models, and a formant vocal filter with seven personas, which adds amazing tonality to bass or synth in small doses - or gives you epic 1970s pads when pushed.
- Integrated effects - a powerful ensemble chorus with nine crossfadable modes, and a lush reverb.
Audio Samples
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SUNFISH vocal and chimes Three instances of SUNFISH - two layers of vocal synth, one layer of chimes, taken from one of our teaser videos.
SUNFISH 'Not in those shoes' preset A demo of the '[arp] Not in those shoes' preset with a simple two-chord sequence, over a basic kick-and-hats beat. The whoosh section is made through timeline automation of the integrated reverb effect.
SUNFISH vocal sequence A chord sequence through a single instance of SUNFISH exploring some of the evocative sounds possible via the formant 'vocal' filters.
SUNFISH electronic layers Three layers of SUNFISH (over sampled drums), demonstrating the rich, vintage tones possible from this synth. The bass part uses MPE (per-channel) pitchbend for interesting mid-sequence note slides.
SUNFISH soft loops A short electronica sequence with two instances of SUNFISH, one for pads and one for the melody.
SUNFISH morpher bass sequence 1 A demonstration of the morpher - a six-note synth part playing while dragging the mouse around the morpher surface in real-time, and finally adding some vox (formant filter) effects.
SUNFISH morpher bass sequence 2 More bass sounds available from the morpher (bass, bank 1).
Downloads
Our software is free to demo; demos can be unlocked to the full, unrestricted version with a registration code, provided on purchase.
This software will run in demo mode until registered. While in demo mode, the software will not save presets or settings, and will occasionally make weird noises that are slightly like a robot unsuccessfully trying to say "demo mode".
Use of this software is subject to our Terms and Conditions and End User License Agreement.