This week Torsten returns to share his first impressions of U-He’s Diva synth, and demonstrates how quickly users can create rich, melodic patches suitable to practically any genre.
As a robust synthesis emulation instrument, Diva aims to “capture the spirit of analogue” without sacrificing the ease-of-use afforded to virtual instruments. As a result, Diva proves to be as pleasant to use as its timbre is to hear. Many hidden features provide users with unrivalled precision when aspiring to achieve a specific sonic characteristic.
Intricate and beautiful, Diva delivers a wide verity of pseudo-modular configurations. Unlike many emulators that merely mimmic the timbre of a single synthesizer, Diva models a wide variety of individual components from famous devices including the MiniMoog, the Korg MS-20, and the Roland Alpha Juno (among many others).
The pristine interface invites its users to to mix and match oscillators, filters, and envelopes and create previously unachievable (or wildly impractical) combinations. As an example, Torsten experiments by routing the oscillator section from the Korg MS-20 through a MiniMoog filter before adding some final polish using the effects modules.
Diva boasts a friendly, powerful user interface while achieving lush, authentic-sounding analogue sound and captures seemingly unattainable similarity to the synthesizers it emulates. But every digital miracle comes with its price. According to U-He’s own description of Diva, its authentic sound “comes at the cost of quite a high CPU-hit, but we think it was worth it.” Given the appropriate processor and RAM, we certainly can’t disagree!
