Full Bucket Music: The Scrooo

German programmer and software engineer Björn Arlt began building VST plugins under the name Full Bucket Effects in 2010. Being a musician, and a synth enthusiast from a young age, he was drawn to analysing and building software synths. He now offers both synth emulations and effects as freeware through his website.

The Scrooo is a polyphonic software synthesizer plugin which features three formant generators with individual centre frequencies and bandwidths. Furthermore, the centre frequency and amplitude of each formant can be modulated by various modulation sources.

There are three modes of formant generation:

Fixed. The centre frequency of the formant is independent of the oscillator’s base frequency; the generated spectrum will contain only integer multiples of the base frequency (i.e. harmonics).

Partial. The centre frequency of the formant is a fractional multiple of the oscillator’s base frequency; the generated spectrum will contain only integer multiples of the base frequency (i.e. harmonics).

Ring. The centre frequency of the formant is a fractional multiple of the oscillator frequency; the generated spectrum typically will contain inharmonic frequencies.

The V2.0 update of The Scrooo provides an ‘oscilloscope screen’ for each formant, displaying rough sketches of the resulting wave form (Partial mode), wave shape (Ring mode) or frequency spectrum (Fixed mode).

Features:

• Up to 64 voices polyphony including Unison mode and portamento
• Two band-limited carrier oscillators
• Three fully independent formant generator sections
• Three formant generation modes
• Two amplifiers with volume and panorama control
• Three envelopes (ADSR) with exponential slopes
• Three low frequency oscillators (LFOs) with tempo synchronisation
• Supports MTS-ESP by ODDSound dynamic micro-tuning
• MIDI Learn – all parameters can be controlled by MIDI CC
• Plugin supports Windows and macOS (32 bit and 64 bit)