Review: UVX80 Vintage Virtual Synthesizer by UVI

In this review, we are going to be going over another UVI‘s recreation of a classic synth from the 80’s the UVX-80.

Uvi won’t say which synth it is exactly – “Inspired by a rare Japanese 8-voice analog synth”, but judging from the design you can probably already guess it’s the Akai AX-80.

[box type=”info” align=”” class=”” width=””]The Akai AX80, the first analog, polyphonic synthesizer of the Japanese manufacturer. The instrument entered the market in 1984, had an impressive futuristic appearance, and had digitally controlled 2 + 1 oscillators, 8-voices and 61-keys. Technically, it was comparable to the Roland JX-3P, but had a more robust architecture with two additional voices, a sub-oscillator, and a true pulse width modulation.[/box]

According to UVI, the UVX80 presents the characteristic sound of the original and its many sound design possibilities, ranging from warm basses, gripping leads, atmospheric soundscapes and sound effects to crunchy bells and even strings.

In Depth

The UVX-80 is a two layer architecture meaning you have two oscillators (1 and 2) that you can edit and modulate separately and give each its own distinct sound allowing you to blend together really fun sounds.

Each oscillator comes with their own multimode filter, ADSR envelopes, pitch control, portamento, stereo position, arpeggiator and modulation wheel assignments. A flexible LFO and 16-step modulator provide fast control of the volume and filter, and a final effect section shines with high-quality distortion, chorus, phasers, delay, and reverb.

The UVX-80 also includes over 250 presets to choose from and has a simple and easy to use interface with 5 pages to edit, shape and modify the sounds you working on, the interface looks great and is easy to navigate.

Starting from the top you can choose which layers to edit giving each its own amplitude envelope to change the shape of your sound with velocity sensitivity and velocity sensitivity for the attack meaning a harder hit on your keys would have a faster attack than a softer hit.

Next to the amplitude section, we have the standard filter controls such as Cutoff, Resonance, Depth, ADSR, and Velocity and has 3 filter types to choose from LP, BP and HP.

Underneath that, we have the oscillator section where you can switch each OSC on or off, set their volume and panning and then change the sound preset of each oscillator. OSC1 having 28 different presets to choose from and OSC2 having over a 100 to choose from so safe to say you can create a whole bunch of sounds with the UVX-80.

Moving on to the edit page we can edit each layers pitch in octaves and semitones have each layer play either in polyphonic or monophonic mode and set the Portamento for those nice slides between notes and adjust the timing of those slides and the depth of the slide.

The mod-wheel of your keyboard can be set to control the vibrato, Tremolo and the filter which is nice to give some extra flair to the notes you are playing and next to that you can adjust the stereo image of your sound by giving it some spread and detune and add some colour or by having it alternate between the left and right speaker.

In the modulation, page is where you can add modulate your sound in a few ways by using the step sequencer or by utilizing the LFO.

When using the step sequencer you can modulate the Volume and Filter of each oscillator with controls to set the amount and speed of the steps you have programmed in and set a rise and delay.

The AVRG (Average) control interpolates between similar values of the steps and smooths it out to create a custom LFO type of effect.

The LFO modulator allows you to modulate the Volume, Filter depth and Pitch depth of each oscillator with the use of 4 LFO types Sine, Square, Saw, and Sample and hold which can be set to retrig or not and to Legato.

The FX page allows you to add five different types of effects to your sound Drive, Chorus, Phaser, Delay, and Reverb. These effects can really help to give your sound that little bit extra that it needs.

The controls for the FX are Simple and straight forward basically all you need to get a great sound without making it confusing which is something that a beginner would really like but if you go under the hood of the patch in Falcon you can make it as complex as you want so best of both worlds there.

The ARP page allows you to set each oscillator with its own arpeggiation sequence.

This allows you to create some great syncopated lines in whatever sound you are sculpting again this is super easy and straightforward in its use allowing you to set your arp to go in an Up, Down and up/down fashion four knobs control a number of steps the speed at which they are played at the octave it is played in and a gate for either short notes or longer ones.

In conclusion

The UVX-80 is another great library to have in your collection it has allot of great presets to play with and enough options to keep you creating some new ones for a foreseeable time.

Uvi does an amazing job on all of the libraries they put out putting allot of care in how a product sounds, looks and plays doing a great job recreating old synths with some new flavor as well as creating new and original products. Getting any of their libraries is money well spent in my humble opinion.
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Pros:

• Great sounds
• Easy to use
• CPU friendly
• Good value

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Cons:

• Maybe a little complicated to install for those who do not have experience with UVI’s products, but it’s worth the effort, I assure you!

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Price and Availability

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UVI UVX80 is now available for an introductory price of 49 Euro (regular 79 Euro) in the manufacturer shop. The instrument runs in the UVI Workstation, which is available free of charge as a plug-in for Windows and Mac.

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Also included in…

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UVX80 is also included in Vintage Vault 2 plugin bundle with 50 virtual synth instruments, 111 virtual drum machines, and over 7,000 hand-crafted presets. Save up to $2,600!

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