XILS 505: Paraphonic String, Synth and Bass Plugin by XILS Lab Free Download

The core of XILS 505 is a Top Octave Divider oscillator, the same concept used in many electronic organs and string machines of the 1970s and 80s. XILS Lab describes it as a faithfully emulated, aliasing-free design providing up to 49 voices of polyphony.

Because all notes derive from one shared high-frequency oscillator, they stay in phase, so there is no drift between octaves. The developer notes that this shared tuning also means every note responds the same way to the glide section, which produces the distinctive effect associated with this family of instruments.

The string section has its own filter, waveform mangling and AR settings. The synthesizer section adds an ADSR, a 24 dB analog filter and a retrigger function called Second Touch, which recreates a monophonic play mode of the original hardware.

XILS 505 includes a modulation matrix with six nodes, connecting 14 sources to 24 destinations. A main LFO controls vibrato, a second LFO can be assigned freely in the matrix, and a DADSR envelope is also available as a modulation source.

The built-in effects are a quadruple BBD chorus/ensemble with a separate send level for each section, a raw analog phaser, a vintage reverb and a true stereo space effect. The mixer panel gives control over the relative levels of the human voices and the ensemble dry/wet balance.

All parameters can be controlled via MIDI CC in your DAW. A preset manager lets you tag presets and search them by multiple criteria.