SonicProjects History

It's the year 2006, January. George W. Bush is US president. PCs run Windows XP and Pentium one-core CPUs, Apple still uses PowerPC CPUs (G5) but announces the transition to Intel CPUs, no 64bit, no https, YouTube was founded just a few months ago but yet widely unknown, the biggest social media platform is MySpace, which also offered videos, but in horrible quality, and nobody thought of using online videos for anything other than funny cat videos.

Our studio OB-X, Rev. 2 built in 1980, an impressively looking and sounding huge monster synth - purchased in the early 90s for $1600 when analog gear was considered dated trash and was sold by people for almost nothing to get a Yamaha SY99 or alike, kept having issues, flashing LEDs, suddenly losing sound, despite being repaired several times already for a lot of money.

The fear of losing the great sounds this machine produced once the device finally should die, triggered the idea to have a digital replacement - so a plugin synth that can reproduce the sounds we loved so much this machine could produce, these lush organic sounding sweeps and pads, the never stiff sounding lively sync leads, the polyphonic portamentos, the soft brasses.

So we started an intense search for synth plugins that can produce these types of sounds, regardless how they look and what they pretend to be. But nothing really came anywhere close. The filters were thinning out and lacking the low end part in high resonance setting which made the OB-X sound as warm and pleasant, and more importantly: they sounded stiff and static since they simply cloned the voices to achieve polyphony and lacked the slight differences between the individual voice boards which made the OB-X sound as lively and organic. Also hard sync mostly sounded terrible and nowhere near how the OB-X sync sounds in the plugins we tried.

So the only way left was to create an emergency replacement for the OB-X by ourselves, fitting our specific needs and demands. The easiest way to do this without studying VST plugin development before was Reaktor, which offered a modular toolkit to build one's own synths.

The problem however turned out to become the separate voices, since also in Reaktor achieving polyphony was based on simple cloning, which again would have lead to the stiff and static sound of the plugins we already tried. So we had to find a way to trick Reaktor to achieve this, which was unbelievably difficult, but finally we succeeded in doing it. And the result sounded as incredibly authentic (also because the voices' individual detunings were all cloned 1:1 from our hardware device) that the goal in doing an emergency replacement (in case the machine should die) seemed to be achieved.

Since the digital environment offered some freedom we still added some stuff we always missed in the original, namely a separate independent LFO for the modulation lever vibrato, a simple arpeggiator, preset individual volume, a way to undo auto-tune since some sounds like leads and long decay sweeps sounded great in not yet auto-tuned state right after switching on the device, while others like snappy brass sounded better after auto-tune. The only way to undo auto-tune was to switch the whole device off and on again. Also a way to spread the voices' pitch apart to fatten up lead sounds on demand also after auto-tune, so spread added. Also, we wanted to have auto-tune not only for oscillator pitch (as OB-X offers), but also for filter cutoff and filter envelope decay and release, so the stuff you notice the most when it's different from voice to voice. Also aftertouch and velocity sensitivity sometimes would have been great but missing in OB-X, so added too, and when we're already adding some gimmicks why not add a ring modulator, a way to use the filter envelope as modulation source as only later models like OB-Xa and OB-8 offered, and make the pan pots which were only accessible after opening the lid directly accessible on the interface. Then finally cloning the sounds we used in the OB-X (which offers 32 saveable presets), so 32 sounds including the big sweeps, sync sounds, slow spread portamento pads, experimental x-mod effect sounds, lush unison basses, some soft brasses, done. And our custom OB-X clone was done - after hundreds of hours of work - but done. Incredible! Which was a big relief in case our beloved vintage OB-X one day finally should die entirely.

Originally done only as emergency replacement for our own studio (which also included other vintage synths and string machines), and being unbelievably convincing in cloning the typical OB-X sounds we always used, now quasi "un-destroyable" in a digital replacement, suddenly the idea came up: why not sell it to other people? This since there obviously was nothing out there coming anywhere close in cloning the sounds of this iconic machine. So there could be a demand maybe? Who knows!

But selling something to others requires a bit more than just using by oneself - an attractive interface preferably resembling the original synth, a user manual, a website and payment options, etc. Audio clips to demonstrate the sounds. And maybe also a restricted demo version in order potential buyers can try it before buying. Quite some additional work. But it was worth a try. So SonicProjects was born in January 2006, with its first ever product OP-X Reaktor released in February of 2006.

Being released in February 2006 for sale and no alternatives available, and no other plugin doing the real hardware-cloning separate and tunable voices internally to this extent (called "slope" today), OP-X Reaktor and a bit later OP-X VST has the honour to be the world's first digital synth usable in a sequencer fulfilling these criteria. But regarding separate voices still without the possibility to tune voices individually. This only came a few months later (however still in 2006) with OP-X PRO. But more to this one later.

As described in the introduction above, online videos at this time were used for funny cat videos. Nobody thought of using them for anything else, also because the quality was just as bad. And the audio quality even worse. Unusable for music.

But we wanted to have a video demo of OP-X Reaktor. Why? It's the most pleasant way to show something to someone else, maybe even explain it, and in case of an instrument what sounds it can do, which also triggers emotions, and as a result maybe the wish to get it. So lacking a platform which offered sufficient video and audio quality for such a demonstration we produced a video and hosted it as flash video on our own servers.

It seemed that hardly anybody was using videos these days to promote plugins, so it seemed to be a good move. And the feedback from the first customers was unambiguous: "I watched your video, was blown away and bought it!" This was the start of our consequent video marketing which then also was used for all coming products.

Our video channel has generated more than 3,6 million views so far with several videos over 200k views and one even over 1 million views, including several multi-hour tutorials, bank demos, synth tech videos, famous 80s sound videos and more. Check it out!

The first copy of "OP-X Reaktor" for sale online was sold on 15th February 2006 to a customer in the USA. What a feeling! And this with hardly any marketing, just web-search tags, and some linking on OB-X fan sites.

More customers followed, and all of them raved about the product. Many of them owned OB synths in the past and were desperately looking for a replacement, so the existence of our product was a godsend to them. And they knew the hardware by themselves by heart and were absolutely blown away and convinced by our product, amongst them well known producers - so we must have done something right!

This was a question of one of the first customers after having purchased the product online and after trying the included sounds, which as described earlier were just some typical general OB-X sounds like sweeps, leads, brasses and pads. We never even thought of including some type of famous 80s sounds originally done with the OB-X or OB synths in general since we never used or OB-X for anything alike.

So no, we had to tell this customer that there's no Jump sound in the presets. But to satisfy his needs we tried to clone this sound and sent it to him - and he was pleased. So this was the start of at all including well known famous 80s sounds. We then did some research and did some more, to maybe anticipate possible similar requests.

But the more there were, the more people asked for even more, also for sounds that originally were done with other voltage controlled polyphonic analog synths like Jupiter-8 or Prophet-5. So we tried to do these too, but some seemed to require additional features which the OB-X didn't have but the synths they originally were done with. So this triggered plans to add features in coming new versions which make it possible to do these sounds.

While Reaktor was pretty popular and in use at many mainly professional users, not everyone owned it - but Reaktor was required to run our synth. This and lack of alternatives for an OB-X clone went as far that people bought Reaktor just to run our synth. But not eveyone could afford this, and most people used sequencers like Cubase and were using VST plugins. So we had to do a VST version of OP-X to get a wider coverage. This one then was released in April of 2006, still only for windows, but with some added features like switchable sine waves for the oscillators to be able to do Yamaha type FM type basic waves for bell sounds, a better (but still simple) arpeggiator, and an extended patches library. Also, the new coding freedom allowed to realize a voice allocation unit with circular allocation to the voices like in the original and completely independent voices with independent signal path like the voice boards of the original, which founded the base of an engine that was one hundred percent true to the original and which never was realized in a plugin before. The basic sound of OP-X VST was a bit different than the one of OP-X Reaktor, less bright, but warmer and fuller, very pleasant and powerful, and very well fitting itself into a mix. A lot of sound examples were created to showcase the synth, and they blew away buyers. The VST version was an immediate success and extended the user base by quite some numbers.

Succesfully doing a convincing VST replacement for our OB-X, we then thought we could do the same with our 3 vintage string machines in the studio, which included the ARP Omni 2, the Logan String Melody II, and the Welson Symphony. These have no MIDI, so only could be recorded straight to disk with no flexibility, and live-layering only was possible by playing the one with the left and the other with the right hand. So quite unflexible. No MIDI, no editing afterwards. And these machines were big and heavy. So a more flexible clone would be great, which includes the presets we used the most from all three, and this freely layerable. But it had to be in the same professional audio quality we used to record the machines to disk, so using Apogee(TM) converters with extremely low jitter, and completely inaudible loops, which only can be achieved by using very long loops (up to 4 seconds) matching the natural beating. So another project started, namely sampling two chosen presets of each device for every key using Apogee(TM) converters, which resulted in hundreds of recordings, which afterwards were de-hummed, de-noised, and finally perfectly looped (up to 4 seconds) so that playing and holding the looped sample was indistinguishable from hitting and holding a key in the real device - which was a murderous work, but finally accomplished. Then create two engines that can be layered and split, and also can be tuned individually to achieve nice beats when layered. Stringer was born! And it sounded really incredible, very 3D and shimmering, the Logan fat, warm and lively. And all this layerable, splittable, tunable, with total recall and also all the MIDI flexibility a VST plugin offers!

September 2006: Stringer released - the world's first dual-engine String Machine is born!

Stringer turned out to be this at the time of its release. Still pretty simple with no effects and further engines as later on added, but it did its job, at least for our purpose. No more bulky, heavy and unflexible hardware needed. It was clear that it would become nowhere as popular as the OP-X, but it was offered for sale as third product (after OP-X Realtor and OP-X VST). And it found its lovers too including some famous artists praising its outstanding sampling quality exceeding everything else available at this time! And it should be extended and modernized several times over the next two decades. More to this later. But now back to OP-X.

If you believe it or not, the first versions of our plugins all were personally stamped, so compiled individually for each new customer. With increasing number of customers this wasn't possible to maintain anymore, so a new license key licensing system had to be developed. But we didn't want to bother customers with dongles or CR. The licensing system should be the way we would like it to have if we were a buyer by ourselves. So we chose a system based on personalized license keys, which is a good compromise between savety and not bothering buyers with restrictions and dependency.

This user-complaint - which only was "fixable" in OP-X by activating auto-tune for the filters, triggered the idea to make the individual voices custom tunable with trimpots - as the OB-X and all other voltage controlled polyphonic analog synths offered in the inside on the circuit boards for technicians - so in order to tune the synth to make the individual separate voices sound as even as possible. But the un-evenness of the voices is exactly what we liked about the OB-X, so this organic lively sound. So why not give the user the cotrol over ALL of it, also the inner life of the synth - as it too is the case in the original synths? So this was the birth of the trimpots that let the user tune the voices individually independent from the global auto-tune (which adds offset voltages to even out the differences), so to have a custom detuning that fits ones own taste if required. So this customer then could simply tweak the cutoff tuning trimpot of voice 6 a bit lower to make it sound as he liked.

But as described before, there anyway were plans to add features to make it possible to clone requested famous sounds originally done with other synths like Jupiter-8 or Prophet-5, or even SEM or Matrix-12 - so this was the chance to create a new extended version offering the voice's individual tuning trimpots plus the added features.

OP-X PRO - so the extended version of OP-X offering tuning trimpots for its individual voices - marked the definitive base for our success during the comning two decades. The added features apart from the voice trimpots included a seamlessly blendable dual-filter multimode filter inspired by the SEM (which could seamlessly blend bewteen lopass and high-pass, with a fixed bandpass position) but extended with an in itself morphable second filter (not only highpass, but seamlessly blendable between highpass, bandpass and notch, which gives incredible morphing possibilities), extended with a switchable 24dB mode, and the filter mix automatable by LFO and filter envelope. So quasi a SEM on stereoids, which even allowed to do Xpander-type sounds. Further added features were an AMP destination for the LFO, and individually deactivatable voices (voice mute) for less fat unison sounds, a switchable legato mode for unison sounds, an option for seamless oscillator frequency adjustment instead of the quantized mode taken from the OB-X, and last but not least a world-unique feature called panning modulation (pan mod) which lets you modulate the individual voice pans by LFO which creates an extremely rich and lively stereo sound without having to use a chorus effect. Plus it included tons of new sounds, also using the new multimode filter.

OP-X PRO became quite a success after its launch. It caught the attention of many synth fetishists, also some famous artits, was praised in many reviews, and also caught the attention of other companies and resellers.

Back in the day laptops weren't powerful enough to run complex VST plugin setups for professional live application, so most big music acts in the US were using the Muse Research Receptor, which was a hardware VST plugin host in 19" rack-format, made by the company Muse Research located in Menlo Park in the Silicon Valley, inside being a custom designed computer running an adapted version of Linux and a custom designed rack-host (Muse Machine) for creating VST instrument setups for professional live performance.

Muse Research contacted us since they were interested in including our plugins pre-installed (in demo mode, licensable through Pluggorama run by Muse Research) in their devices. That's where the cooperation started. So our plugns of the time (OP-X, OP-X PRO and Stringer) were included pre-installed in all featured Receptors, introduced at AES New York 2007. It wasn't a big financial booster for us, but since most famous artist in the US used the Receptor back then live on stage it got us connected to many famous artists, like Foreigner, Cher and others.

The thought a cheap preset only version, starting at a very restricted free version just having 11 presets, could sell in much larger numbers and be an entry step for further upgrades in the end turned out not to become true. This whole upgrade path from free (OP-X FREE) to OP-X PLAYER (preset only version) to OP-X and OP-X PRO was there and also was used, but never really worked in the way we hoped, so increasing the numbers of sales by offering a cut-down preset only entry level version. OP-X PLAYER never was sold in big numbers. Amazingly, the most advanced and most expensive version (at the time OP-X PRO) kept selling the most. But we kept it in our products catalog. Years later OP-X PLAYER finally was discontinued for good.

Back to OP-X PRO: Also outside of the Muse Receptor world more and more famous artists became aware of us and got our plugins, like both the current (2008) and former (Revolution) keyboard player of Prince, Night Ranger, Rooney, Mike Posner (Gigamesh) and countless others. Almost all of them normal self-intended buyers, so not sponsored. And nevertheless willing to do a testimonial. That's when we started building our big testimonial base, all featuring honest testimonials without any sponsoring pushing or "buying" them. To give users an opinion from professionals using the plugins in the real world on stage or in the studio, but also hobbyists and normal home users.

OP-X PRO also caught the attention of the Japanese company Grantech Co. Limited run by the legendary YouTube-Keyboard-legend Katsunori Ujiie. The manuals were translated to Japanese, and Grantech acted as relesser in Japan all in Japanese language, which created the next big user base after the initial success in the USA. So our first two big markets were the USA and Japan. Europe came quite a bit later.

The video-cassette sized little hardware VST player V-Machine from SM Pro Audio caught the attention of live musicians worldwide as it was introduced at Musikmesse and Namm. It looked amazing. This time it was us taking the lead and contacting the company, offering them developing an adapted and optimized version of OP-X to include pre-installed in the machine. It seemed a dream to us to have a quasi-hardware digital OP-X in such a tiny box, paired with a controller like Behringer's BCR2000. Despite SM Pro Audio was enthusiastic about the sound of OP-X, integration in the machine itself never happened because of differences of opinions regarding licensing amongst other participating plugin developers. But OP-X was included on their "Classic Keys Collection" DVD which came with the V-Machine or could be purchased with it and licensing happened via a special port on our own website, as the other plugin developers did. Our plugin then was demoed running in the V-Machine at several promotion events all around the world, amongst them in Beijing China. Plus we offered a special V-Machine bundle by ourselves including optimized versions of OP-X and Stringer, streamlined and cpu-optimized to be able to run on the V-Machine which only had scarce CPU power. Not even OP-X would have run on it without optimization, and not to speak of OP-X PRO. A more powerful V-Machine that could have run the later coming OP-X PRO-II (which would have been a dream for us) was announced, but in the end never released. The dream then ended at some point when the V-Machine finally was abandoned. Years later SM Pro Audio stopped existing at all. But the whole need for cpu optimization and providing separate effect plugins somehow paved the way to our next big thing, the OP-X PRO-II, which included many of these optimizations in its engine.

Despite customers loved OP-X PRO and its sound, they kept asking fo adding stuff, like even more famous sounds, more polyphony (OP-X and OP-X PRO were only 6 voice, since originally 1:1 cloned from our 6 voice OB-X), preferrably 12 to be able to do these broad Matrix-12 pads, some effects like delay and reverb in order not to have to add these externally if needed (OP-X and OP-X PRO had NO effects at all, so completely pure!), a better arpeggiator also including Jupiter-8 type arpeggiating, voice mutes not only muting voices but cutting them off the allocation unit, the possibility for seamless global detuning (autotune), seamless oscillator level setting on demand, and a real synth-included patch browser (OP-X and OP-X PRO relied on the host for this). Which all was a huge challenge to fullfill, but it resulted in the legendary OP-X PRO-II.

OP-X PRO-II became a huge success. Including all the features and wishes coming from users as described above, it was an immediate winner. All that still was missing in OP-X PRO was there, 12-voice polyphony like Matrix-12, effects, an own patch browser, masses (1'500) of great included presets, a very capable arpeggiator which also was a MIDI processor offering a step sequencer, chords, chord hold and note doubling, MIDI learn with sophisticated features like relative and fetched response as it also was implemented in the real devices to handle the divergent settings of patch memory and knob position, a brightness switch to make the sound brighter if needed, and much more. This made OP-X PRO-II not only an OB clone on stereoids but a virtual analog synth that could clone nearly all iconic sounds from various vintage voltage controlled polyphonic analog synths - since they all basically worked the same internally, just different filters (which was very flexible in OP-X PRO already before), different user interface, and more or less stability/detuning, which was the speciality of this synth anyway. So OP-X PRO-II became the swiss army knife for characterful, fat sounding and authentic analog sounds in general. Despite still being windows only natively, its special VFX version allowed to run it in a special host (VFX) in Macs.

If something is good, you always want more of it. This also was the case with sounds for OP-X PRO-II. Even after its release more and more additional sound packs were released for free download, often triggered by user requests. The library grew to more than 2'500 sounds like this during the years, including such iconic sound packs like the original Jupiter-8 factory patches, cloned sounds from Matrix-6 and Matrix-12, also disco funk soundsets for D-Train and O'Jays, and much more. You can explore the whole library of OP-X PRO-II on this site:
https://www.sonicprojects.ch/opxpro2/banksinfo.html

Since Muse Research out of some specific reasons did not want to include our new OP-X PRO-II in Receptor (PRO-II not running well enough in their Linux setup), the offer of Lionstracs to include OP-X PRO-II in their own hardware VST player sounded promising, so we agreed to do it. The machine then was demoed at the Musikmesse in Frankfurt showcasing the pre-installed OP-X PRO-II. Corcyra Global was acting as re-seller for the device. Unfortunately this was a short story, and the whole project died before the device actually could be delivered to more than a few customers.

Countless famous acts like Weird Al Yankovic, Joss Stone, Styx, Xavier Naidoo, Cassius, Ariel Pink, American Idol, David Guetta (Fred Rister), Chromeo, McFly, Dash Berlin and many others joined the community. Despite and surprising, OP-X PRO-II still was handled as insider tip. At least, some truly great insiders ;-)

While Mac users could use OP-X Reaktor and the VFX version of OP-X PRO-II, the shift from 32bit to 64bit systems and sequencers had advanced as much that as a plugin developer you had to bring your plugins to 64bit or you were gone. That simple. And Macs always were and remained the computers professional users used, so the need for a native Mac version of OP-X PRO-II was demanded over and over again, and so couldn't be ignored any longer. So when a big required transition was ante portas anyway, why not do both at the same time. Mac OS required 64bit anyway, so time to step into it and make OP-X PRO-II future-proof and multi-platform.

In September of 2015 the transition work to 64bit and Mac platform finally was finished, and OP-X PRO-II 1.2.0 was released for both Windows 64bit, including a VST3 version, and Mac OS-X (min OS-X 10.8).

Sales then literally exploded, manily because of masses of Mac users who had waited for years for this moment. Sales literally doubled from this moment on and remained at this level. Very great times were ahead of OP-X PRO-II, now being multi platform, 64bit, even with the newest VST3 support. It seemeed future proof forever. But as you will see, never say forever in the fastly growing tech world...

Laptops had become much faster in the meantime, now also usable for complex live performance setups, especially the rugged Apple MacBooks. So times got harder for providers of specialized hardware VST Players like the Receptor, finally forcing Muse Research to go out of business since not profitable anymore. An era went to an end, also for us, since the people at Muse Research were the greatest guys you can imagine.

Screens got bigger and bigger during the years, and while users in the past were perfectly happy with the interface size OP-X PRO-II had, starting at maybe 2016 or 2017 complaints about the user interface being too small for their constantly growing screen sizes and resolutions up to 4K started to accumulate, some even saying they can't use OP-X PRO-II anymore because of the tiny interface (which was considered to be even too large in earlier years!). So we needed to act again to remain in the market. Some also said they consider the virtual keyboard as wasted space with no real use. Others however wanted this keyboard. So we decided to work on bigger interfaces, and at the same time offer both options, so an interface with and one without keyboard, each in 3 sizes to cover all possible screen sizes from laptops up to 27" 4K screens.

So in January 2018 we finally provided two interface types each in 3 sizes, at the time still via separate installers (later on switchable directly in the plugin). It was a huge work since all the controls had to be rendered anew from scratch, and re-arranged for the keyboard-less "Rack Edition", but it finally did satisfy the needs of the users.

The available library for OP-X PRO-II had grown to a huge amount (2'700 sounds including all reloads), so it seemed that a special website to explore the whole library could be useful, explaining the origin and background of each of the available banks, together with audio clips and videos giving a demo of the included sounds. This site finally was released in January 2020, short before the 10th birthday of OP-X PRO-II. Shorly afterwards Covid hit and shook the entire world. So the 10th birthday of OP-X PRO-II was in the middle of a pandemic in September of 2020.

In 2020 the older (still 32bit windows) versions of the plugins including OP-X, OP-X PRO, and OP-X PLAYER (which never really was as successful as hoped as described earlier) finally were discontinued, just leaving OP-X PRO-II and Stringer, despite this one too still only was 32 bit windows at this time.

New life for Stringer - 64bit and Mac version released & generative engine - May 2021

In fact, plans were there to finally discontinue Stringer too, since it seemed not to be worth investing a lot of work into it to make it compatible to the newest environments. But exactly at this time - as if it were no coincidence - a very famous artist (no name here) was interested in Stringer since its demos sounded awesome to him - but no luck for him as Mac user since Stringer at this time still only was available for Windows, and this only as 32bit plugin. So this request triggered us to re-think the discontinuation and take some effort to port Stringer to Mac and 64 bit, and at the same time adding new features like a new patch browser, bigger interface, effects, a generative engine which offers the components to create a string machine sound from scratch without using samples (which results in a "true" chorussing behaviour since in samples the sampled chorus always is per-key and not common for all notes as it should) and new presets, which then finally was finished in March 2021. New life and a super-booster for a 15 year old plugin, our second one in fact! Never as successful as OP-X, but beloved by real conaisseurs, amongst them famous artists.

At the end of 2020 Apple announced that they - 15 years after the transition from PPC to Intel - will do another CPU transition to their own new Apple silicon CPUs, starting with the M1. For the time of the transition they would provide a bridge for intel apps (Rosetta 2), and tighten security requiring all plugins to be notarized (equipping with a certificate from Apple) in order not to be blocked. This was a huge shock for us plugin developers, forcing us to transfer all our plugins to be native silicon compatible to have a future, since they would bit by bit transfer their whole Mac lineup to the new CPUs.

So new forced work ahead. The plugins still could be made to work on M silicon Macs through Rosetta 2 and without certificate, but they started failing validation in Logic, and having graphics issues. A big headache!

So as anyone else we had no other choice but to bite the bullet and transfer or plugins to the new silicon CPUs, which was a big headache since it required compilation in the newest Xcode which produced thousands of errors which all had to be sorted out by adapting and modernizing the failed code bits. Which turned out to become a huge work, even only having two plugis to transfer at this time. Companies having many plugis sometimes struggled several years doing this transition. In our case it was done in a few months of intense work.

So the fully native silicon M1 / Intel universal compatible version of OP-X PRO-II was released at the end of 2022, including a new GUI-switcher directly integrated in the plugin. So no separate installers needed anymore for the larger and different interfaces. Future-proof for how long? Hopefully a few years at least... ;-)

At the same time also Stringer was ported to native M1 silicon / Intel universal compatibility, also addig some exclusive features making this machine really unique amongst String machine plugins even after 16 years of its existense, namely:

Inclusion of a real divide-down engine instead of just an added synth-style sawtooth engine (version 3.0) again was initiated by a customer request, wanting "real" behaviour of the sawtooth oscillators in pure mode. This meant: In vintage String machines a high pitched master oscillator was split into the 12 semitones of the highest octave, while all lower octaves then simply were generated by frequency-divider chips, which led to a locked phase situation resulting in the typical "stiff" sound when playing octaves.

Another feature request by a famous artist was to have re-triggering mono envelopes instead of standard polyphonic envelopes which is required to make a virtual String Machine emulator behaving and sounding authentic.

Both of this was extremely difficult to achieve - a real challenge, but we succeeded in doing it!

An own wish was to include several ensemble effects emulating the circuits of the originals - which required a lot of research, studying schematics, etc. Which finally resulted in the choice of totally 5 different ensemble effects, including the one from the Omni and the Solina.

So the high-end quality sampling engine combined with the new component emulating engine (sawtooth engine, mono envelopes, cloned ensemble effects) made this machine the first truly hybrid string machine emulator offering incredible possibilities for people having the highest demands on authenticity and creative freedom.

Credit Suisse, THE classic historic bank for businesses in Switzerland and one of the biggest banks worldwide, had more and more troubles and suffered a loss of trust because of legacy issues and mismanagement. Afer the US tax authorities objected to the annual report only hours before its release and the bank then stopping its release, the trust plummeted and the share price dropped rapidly from already very low 3.20 to around 2.20 (it used to be around 80 in 2007!) which caused panic amongst account holders fearing a crash ahead, which triggered a digital bank-run on March 15, so masses of account holders transferred their assets to other banks to save them from loss, which included us too. In the evening of this day the bank was insolvent and had to ask the Swiss National Bank for around 4 billions immediatly to be able keep on the business. At the end of the week the bank was done, and to prevent a new wordwide finance crisis the Swiss National bank provided up to 250 billions of security for a save takover by the UBS. In these days we also feared about our assets, and we finally were forced to switch business bank after 17 years of business partnership. So quite some stuff too going on in the background apart from development of products. But now back to our products.

So this was the question after transferring OP-X PRO-II and Stringer to the newest M silicon CPUs while even adding the wildest and hardly achievable customer requests. All future proof for the years to come. So where to go now? Simply enjoy?

So this new freedom after all the forced transition work and achieving extremely challenging goals never thought possible originally - this inspired us for even wilder dreams. An ultimate super synth which includes everything ever wished, while erasing some criticism towards OP-X PRO-II regarding complicated programming.

Not yet fullfilled customer wishes on our list were a modulation matrix, modulation effects, at least one further independent envelope for pitch dives and alike, choice between last, lowest and highest note priority in unison mode, keyboard tracking for pulse width modulation to be able to achieve the typical Matrix-12 PWM-pads, and also a way to control at which voice the allocation engine starts to be able to create recallable filter detuning melodies. Plus a more logically structured interface, since on the way from OP-X to OP-X PRO-II new features simply had to be added somewhere outside their actual belonging (like 24dB switch in additional butons row), and an improved audio quality for smoother sweeps and higher maximum brightness. And this without sacrificing the original beloved warm and fat sound character. And also wished by many a better patch manager offering a way to mark favourites and stamp categories, and all of it searchable.

So again a huge challenge. And if challenge anyway, then why not go to the max, so instead of adding just one envelope adding 3, adding two LFOs, adding more filter types including a MG type filter to make the synth even more flexible, create a new patch manager from scratch offering all of the wished features while remaining compatible to all former patches and banks. The realization of the completely new patch manager required inclusion of the fs::filesystem and "set" libraries in Xcode Mac which limited the deployment target (so minimum sytem the synth will run in in Mac) to macOS 10.15, but since Apple kicks out a new OS version every year this should soon vanish as issue for Mac users. And a matrix that allows to do any unbelievably weird and crazy modulations to be able to break out of any barrier if needed. GO TO THE MAX!

But the new monster synth shouldn't replace the long-time proven OP-X PRO-II which has become a modern classic and just recently was updated to the newest standards regarding compatibility and security standards. It should be a separate new plugin that can be used alongside OP-X PRO-II for people that want even more, or missed features in PRO-II at some points. OP-X PRO-II should remain available and also updated.

So there we go. The ultimate super-synth is here. Based on 17 years of engine development and 17 years of growing sound library, offering an incredible sound, incredible features, and an included library of a whooping two thousand first class sounds.

Users go crazy, as many sales as never ever before. The new famous 80s demo video goes viral with one hundred thousand views after just 5 days and 1.3 million one year later.

In July of 2024 our new flagship synth was praised in a comprehensive two pages review in the renowned CM Magazine. „It really does sound impressive!" and „There is a weight and depth to the sound which is sonically a cut above" was their verdict.

But some seem not really satisfied with the interface. The many new controls and not anymore hidden features make it look too dense, some stuff still a little hard to understand without consulting the manual, plus the new brave color choice finds only few friends. So first step offering alternative skins in OP-X original light blue, and also a dark variant for people not liking glary interfaces. Happyness about the alternative skins. But the wish it would be great if the colors could be switched inside the plugin itself. All noted.

The melt-down of Digital River shakes the software world - July 2024 to early 2025

Starting at July of 2024, in our most successful year of all times after the release of OP-X PRO-3, out reseller Digital River (which was the reseller for most other plugin developers all around the globe too, and also for big software companies like Lenovo, Autodesk, Nvidia, in the past even Microsoft, the biggest in the market) announces it will only still pay after two months of a sales period, which did cause some frowns since very unusual, but still no suspicion yet that anything might be wrong with the company. But by connecting with other developers on a big forum thread where other devs described having the exact same issues with Digital River, some not paid at all anymore, the suspicion grew that the company was insolvent and simply tried to gain time. So more and more plugin companies left, some earlier, some later, after not being paid for months for the sales done over their platform. We unfortunately kept hoping too long it all will turn to the good, since the company had been a great and reliable partner since 19 years. But after not being paid and requests only replied by AI bots, new added fees and no info at all, we finally too left Digital River at the end of Novemver, and had to search for new resellers (in our business called "Merchants of Records" or short MoR, since they handle all credit card and VAT stuff which is incredibly compicated since different in each country you sell to), which was a real pita, since you also had to be certified, you had to change your whole sales structures and licensing mechanisms, and this without being an issue for customers and without a break in the business. In the new year we were ready with two new resellers in parallel (to have a redundancy backup in case one melts down again), but having lost one quarter of the income of our best ever year 2024. Digital River finally declared chaper 7 bankruptsy in early 2025, with no hope to get back any of the owed money since as well as no assets were left. At the time of insolvency they owed a total of 77 millions to software companies all around the globe, while only having 2'500 liquid and 700k bound assets left. So the money from many hundreds of sales lost, but having to look forward and going on. That's stuff customers don't see. So back from business troubles to what's more interesting for users, namely the products.

Upon some further own programming realizing that some stuff, especially in the LFOs and Envelopes section is a bit opaque indeed. So plans to still streamlining and re-structuring all a bit, removing stuff rarely needed, cleaning it up a bit, modernizing some displays, including a color switcher.

At the same time adding new free sound packs on the reloads site, can't you include also this and that famous sound. Released as new sound packs here. Plus further general inspiring sounds using the new features of the engine. Growing to more than 400 additional sounds after two years.

And in December of 2025, short before our 20th anniversary, the streamlined new version is released. called "Programmer's Edition", including an integrated color switcher and a streamlined interface for easier programming. Welcome!

So as you can see, a lot went on in the last 20 years. The crazy thing is that almost every company we had a business relation with doesn't exist anymore, Muse Research, SM Pro Audio, Lionstracs/Corcyra Global, Credit Suisse, Digital River.

But we're still here. And here to remain. And here to listen to our customers and make their dreams true! And this hopefully still for a long time.

And everything relevant was ported to the newest standards and CPU compatibility, so also 20 years later in 2026 you can do each and every sound that was there back in 2006, now baked into 3 remaining plugins that can do it all and much more on top, namely the iconic Stringer, the proven classic OP-X PRO-II and the new super-synth OP-X PRO-3 - with the possibility to get OP-X PRO-3 for a crossgrade price as OP-X PRO-II licensee, and new OP-X PRO-3 buyers getting the classic OP-X PRO-II as well included for parallel installation if you want to run both alongside. So the happyness of customers always comes first.

So thanks for your ongoing support during two decades, and for your inspiration, requests and ideas to take the plugins to always higher levels, which in the end serves everyone!

SonicProjects principles:

„Our primary goal never was to clone a specific SYNTH - the goal always was to clone specific SOUNDS - which at the beginning required cloning the exact technical structure of a specific synth. Later on, requests for cloning sounds that originally were done with other synths required extending the engine with features borrowed from various other iconic 80s synths like Jupiter-8, Prophet-5 or Matrix-12, which - while still looking like an OB only clone because of the controls and basic layout - made later versions of the synth more and more a general purpose analog synth clone which can do almost any iconic sound of the 80s. The voltage controlled polyphonic analog synths of this era also all internally worked the same, just with different sounding filters, a different user-interface, and more or less ongoing detunings. So by extending the filter with various different available characteristics and offering full control over detunings you can achieve this goal just with ONE synth."

„We only add features that have a real musical application and make sense musically - never just for an impressive list of features from which in the end only 20% really are used. That's also why we never did a straight Matrix-12 clone. How many iconic sounds do come in your mind that made the use of 9 envelopes, 6 LFOs and 20 matrix modulation slots? Probably not one. But flexibility is great, that's why OP-X PRO-3 offers 5 envelopes, 4 LFOs, 10 filter types which aren't just fixed as in Matrix-12 but morphable, plus since it offers sine waves in the oscillators you don't need the filter self ocillation to do FM sounds as it was the case in Matrix-12. Plus a 5-slots modulation matrix which in itself even is more flexible. And of course 12 voices. We claim that you can do any really iconic Matrix-12 sound with OP-X PRO-3."

„If a sound needs to be boosted up with effects to sound good the sound itself is weak. Our first plugins until 2010 didn't have ANY built-in effects! But especially for lead sounds a delay can make the sound fly more a bit, and a tad bit of room reverb sometimes can make brasses fitting better in a mix. That's why a delay and reverb engine was introduced with OP-X PRO-II, and since we did a lot of research in chorus und ensemble effects for our Stringer plugin we finally included these too in OP-X PRO-3, which can be nice especially with arpeggios. But even in OP-X PRO-3 having effect options 50% of all sounds don't have ANY effects applied. Since they don't require effects to sound good."

„We listen to what customers want and also to what they criticise, and always try and tried to fullfill these. A big part of what our plugins offer today originally was based on customer requests."

OP-X PRO-II out! Click here!

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