Universal Audio is renowned for its well-regarded software emulations of vintage studio gear, but the company also has a handful of plugins in its product catalogue that recreate the sound of classic instruments from years past, including the Minimoog, Hammond B3 and Rhodes MK1.
Launched back in 2022, Universal Audio's PolyMAX synth isn't based on a single instrument, but instead draws broader inspiration from the "golden age of polysynthesis", an era that brought us iconic synths like the Jupiter-8, OB-X and Prophet-5. Until now, PolyMAX has been priced at $199, but the folks at UA must be in a particularly generous mood, as they're giving it away for free until June 30.
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Universal Audio says that PolyMAX delivers the "organic, subtle beauty and musicality of classic analogue polyphonic synthesizers", cherrypicking features, circuits and sounds from the developers' favourite vintage instruments and "mixing, matching and modelling" these to create a "modern synth with retro roots".
As you'd expect, then, PolyMAX has a classic subtractive architecture: its dual analogue-modelled oscillators are equipped with continuously variable waveforms spanning triangle, sawtooth, square and pulse waves, and it has linear FM and osc sync, along with a noise oscillator.
PolyMAX's resonant filter has low-pass, high-pass, band-pass and notch modes, giving you a choice between 4-pole and 2-pole slopes, while its mod envelope and tempo-syncable LFO can be used to modulate pitch, filter cutoff, FM amount and sync amount.
The synth features a healthy selection of effects: two effects slots provide a choice of phaser, flanger and chorus, along with delay and two types of reverb, including the "Hall B" algorithm from UA's Lexicon 224 emulation. There's also a multimode arpeggiator onboard.
We dug out our copy of PolyMAX while writing this piece and were impressed with its decent-sounding effects and varied catalogue of presets. It's a solid, straightforward poly with a pleasantly intuitive interface that makes designing basic patches quick and relatively easy. If there's space in your digital studio for another vintage-inspired subtractive synth, this one's worth a download.
Universal Audio's Half-Yearly Sale kicked off yesterday, and the brand is offering music-makers up to 80% off its full catalogue of plugins and bundles. UAD Spark is currently on sale for $99/year.
