To my ears, never challenged as the best simulation of a Hammond B3 — despite very stiff competition from the likes of a.o. GG Audio (Blue3) and Acoustic Samples (B5) — Genuine Software's VB3, which for a looooong time seemed destined to spend its entire life as a 32-bit plugin, is finally updated and now has all the features and functionality that people expect from today's plug-ins.
I got a little worried at first when I read that the VB3 II is "a whole new product" and fitted with "a new sound", because the one thing that set its predecessor apart from all the competition was precisely that unique wonderful sound it had: a warm, creamy and fat timbre (with a very nice distortion, if so desired) that I've never heard in any of the VB3's competitors.
The sound in the videos below is most promising though, so the next step is to download and install the demo version, and spend a few hours with it.
The price for this new version may, for some, be a bit of an eye-brow raiser, especially the price for people who already own v1: with the full price being €100, you'd expect the upgrade price to be a bit less than €75, but it isn't. Then again, considering this is actually an entirely new piece of software — and a very good one — the asking price seems more than reasonable to me.
Here's what it says on the website:
.GSi VB3-II is the result of almost 15 years of study, research, experimentation and development of the simulation of a vintage Hammond B3 organ. It is the evolution of the GSi VB3 v1.x with a new sound, a new parameter set, endless possibilities of sound customization. It's not a simple update to an old software, it's a whole new product. It's based on the same sound engine that was written first for the Hamichord Organ, then for the Crumar Mojo, and is also found in the Crumar Mojo61 and in the GSi Gemini. The DSP part of VB3-II was rewritten from the ground up around 2010 and has been constantly updated during all these years by adding features and improvement suggested by many users of our hardware products. Many people requested this sound engine to be released as a software for regular computers, and here it is. Now you can have the sound of a full-featured clonewheel organ right into your computer.
Main features:
- Full polyphony (61 upper + 61 lower + 25 pedals = 147 notes)
- 91 modeled tonewheels with accurate phase synchronization
- Adjustable leakage noise and cross modulation between tonewheels
- A total of 22 different tonewheel generators to choose from
- Generator shaping for a total of 154 generator combinations
- Adjustable global tuning from 430 to 450 Hz
- Foldback on 16" deactivatable
- Complex wheels
- Resistor wiring with multiple options
- Realistic “run” motor wow & flutter
- Busbars and 9 key contact simulation
- Two separate sets of drawbars per manual
- Full "inverted octave" presets
- String Bass with adjustable release time
- Loudness "robbing" effect
- Single triggered percussion with natural capacitor discharge/recharge
- Adjustable Percussion Level & Decay
- Vibrato/Chorus virtual scanner
- Adjustable Vibrato Scanner depth & mix
- Separated Upper and Lower V/C tablets with smooth switching
- Dynamic tube overdrive simulation
- Digital stereo reverb
- Rotary speaker simulation with virtual microphone positioning
- Rotors "Front Stop" brake position
- Very low CPU consumption
- Advanced MIDI Learn function with import/export of custom mappings
- Upper and Lower manuals SPLIT with adjustable split point
- Adjustable output level
- Supports pedal sustain
- Custom programmer with import/export of Programs and Banks
- and more
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