Vintage-inspired Virtual Voltage and Stinging Hybrid Synthesis
A certain black- and yellow-coated hybrid synth of 1978 may have failed to take full flight in its time, but the ensuing years have seen past and present sound hounds vindicating its misunderstood musical magic. With so much buzz, Cherry Audio developed Yellowjacket. This soft synth pays homage to the waspy wizardry of the digital-analog dynamo. It masterfully captures everything loved about the celebrated circuitry, while carefully expanding it to bring its innovative ingenuity to the modern sound-shaping landscape, with all its original stripes intact. Hundreds of masterfully crafted presets undergird a 16-voice, dual-oscillator architecture. Meanwhile, a suite of effects and modulation-routing tools dovetail into the garrison of painstaking emulation via state-of-the-art capture technologies, all the way down to the capacitive touch keybed and charming built-in speaker of the original — Cherry Audio’s even faithfully recreated the coveted 2-pole, state-variable 12dB/octave filter and the CD4069 logic chip that powered it. Needless to say, Sweetwater’s synth scholars are duly impressed by the attention to detail paid to developing Yellow Jacket.
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New sonic shades, classic black-and-yellow buzz
Expanding the presence of Yellowjacket’s Hymenoptera heritage to a massive 16 voices is only the beginning if Cherry Audio’s visionary virtual voltage. Yellowjacket boasts an expanded palette of performance possibilities across a 2-oscillator waveform array — with pulse, ramp, square-wave, and enhanced modulated pulse-wave (borrowed from its predecessor’s gnat-like series sibling) — that includes robust Sync, Unison, and monophonic modes. More than 270 presets span booming basses, synesthetic strings, incisive arps, polychromic pads, single-key chords, lightning leads, and beyond, offering streaming-ready sonics and ferocious sandbox foundations in equal measure. The new-to-Yellowjacket Arpeggiator introduces a stereo-field frenzy of momentum, with dynamic Scale, Chance, Humanize, and Randomize controls to build lush, evolving, and immersive full-spectrum sounds.
Proto-MIDI performance power, reimagined
The hardware heritage of Yellowjacket included a pre-MIDI form of interconnectivity, which allowed players to simultaneously control multiple instruments in the series’ imaginative ecosystem. For Yellowjacket, Cherry Audio channels the same sonic spirit, endowing this searing soft synth with comprehensive MIDI integration and interfacing tools that supercharge your sound. With compatible MIDI controllers, you’re afforded velocity, channel aftertouch, and polyphonic aftertouch performances, while deep root- and diatonic-scale controls let you transpose quantized notes straight from your MIDI source. What’s more, with compatible gesture-capable tablets and touchscreen monitors, you’re able to apply nuanced flourishes across individual keys in the UI, with Multi-touch, simulating the capacitive-touch capabilities of the original hardware synth.
Note: Multi-touch performance with touchscreen monitors is only compatible with select Windows devices. Please contact your Sweetwater Sales Engineer with any questions.
Multi-voice magic and multidimensional modulation
On their own, Yellowjacket’s multi-waveform LFO and pair of envelope generators — VCA (voltage-controlled amplifier) and Control Envelope — provide a wealth of expressive capabilities, mainly when utilized alongside the myriad scale and polyphony modes. Cherry Audio’s reverence for their source material inspired them to apply the same degree of support for music making and sound design opportunities that made the original hardware such a sought-after synth. Yellowjacket offers up to six modulation-routing options that allow values like volume, pitch, filter cutoff, modulation wheels, and reverb faculties to be attenuated by keyboard pressure, with the sixth option being user-assignable control over any one of Yellowjacket’s 29 synth and effects parameters. Moreover, the groundbreaking Multi-voice mode lets you construct per-note variations via three “mini synth” panels — with dedicated pitch, pan, filter frequency, VCA Envelope Attack, and VCA Envelope Release settings — that reinforce prismatic playing, from single-finger chords and arpeggiated patterns to extreme panning or pitch differences and layered stereo-spanning sequences.
Expressive timbral contouring meets tenacious textures and effects
The built-in speaker of the late-1970s hardware synth is a reliable source of charm, for vintage-instrument enthusiasts and sound designers alike, and Cherry Audio developed Yellowjacket with a painstakingly captured speaker — complete with a microphone and controls for Hiss and Hum — that’s perfect for a refinable lo-fi style. On the effect front, Yellowjacket comes with five pro-grade options, each of which contains multitudes of customizable capabilities. Five forms of Reverb and three tempo-syncable delays provide your space-shaping sorcery, while a dual-mode flanger/chorus and a variable, 4-,6-,8-, or 10-stage phaser supply tenacious texturization tools, with everything amped to 11 via Yellowjacket’s multimode overdrive and distortion, Octafuzz.
Cherry Audio Yellowjacket Features:
- Cherry Audio’s imaginative take on a classic, ’70s hybrid synth
- Faithfully captures the sound and style of the original, while immensely expanding its capabilities
- 270-plus pro-grade presets cover basses, leads, arps, pads, strings, basses, and beyond, with near-limitless range to personalize
- Augmented 16-voice polyphony offers 4-, 8, and 16-voice support, in addition to mono, unison, and cycle-voice options
- Dual-oscillator architecture includes ramp, pulse, and square wave choices, alongside a modulated pulse-wave selection that borrows from the original’s gnat-like sibling
- Multi-voice mode allows for complex, prismatic per-note variation to give your patches depth and dimension, pushing sound design to uncharted heights of immersive magic
- Lauded 2-pole, 12dB/octave state-variable filter of the original’s CD4069 logic chip has been meticulously recreated and augmented
- Supercharged filter adds a notch mode and “Q” resonance setting to the lowpass, bandpass, and highpass options found on the original
- Multidimensional modulation includes 6 key-pressure modulation routings, 2 envelope generators, a multi-waveform LFO, polyphonic aftertouch, and user-variable pitch bending
- Select Windows OS-running and gesture-capable tablets and touchscreen monitors support a Multi-touch mode that simulates the capacitive-touch keys and expressive behaviors of the OG
- Powerful and pliable arpeggiator includes step-probability Chance, Humanize, and Randomize settings for wildly dynamic and evolving sequences
- Root- and diatonic-scale control modes let you instantly transpose quantized notes from your MIDI source, in real time
- 5 styles of studio-tier effects include a multimode distortion, up-to-10-stage phaser, flanger/chorus, 3 echo delays, and 5 reverbs
