Monolit — Free VST from BLEASS

BLEASS, known for their innovative and intuitive VST plug-in effects and instruments have released a “gateway drug” to their products. Monolit, they say, is a “free instrument with an expensive sound.”

Monolit is a very efficient and very expressive 2-Oscillator virtual-analog mono synth plug-in capable of producing an array of sounds that go well beyond expectations. Oscillator 1 features four mixable waveforms, while Oscillator 2 provides a single morphable waveform. Additionally, a third oscillator provides for basic FM synthesis.

Three screens provide access to every necessary parameter to create basses, leads, drums — even lush pad-like tones. There are a pair of ADSR envelopes (one for amplitude and one assignable), an assignable multimode LFO, multimode filter, and more.

As I mentioned, this is a versatile and processor-friendly plug-in. For example, all of the sounds in the short demo clip here were produced using 8 instances of Monolit (with a few stock effects from Ableton Live Suite 11) on a very basic laptop (a $400 Acer with a Ryzen 3 processor, 8GB RAM, integrated Radeon graphics, and internal SSD drives, running Windows 11 and Ableton Live Suite 11) with very little strain.

This is a great synth for making Berlin School and ambient music, and will work in any DAW that supports VST plug-ins. As a bonus, it’s also available for free for iOS devices. Full info is available at the BLEASS website.

Note: I have no affiliation with BLEASS, other than being a user of their plug-ins. As of this writing, I do not receive any compensation or consideration from BLEASS. Links in this article are NOT affiliate links, and as of this writing, I make no commission or affiliate income from BLEASS products.