Triple Cheese

While there are certainly many complex synths, hard-to-learn synths, and supersynths available, there are also many simpler virtual musical instruments that you can add to your collection. No one says that a synth has to do everything to be good; sometimes less is more, or at least less is more fun.

This is certainly the case with Triple Cheese, a simple and easy-to-use synth plugin that has the capability of surprising you with its sound.

Triple Cheese is developed by u-he, a company responsible for creating Diva, Hive, Zebra, Repro and a few other powerful and fairly complex synths. Unlike its more well-known brothers and sisters, Triple Cheese is free and has a fairly limited amount of functions. However, that doesn’t mean that the developers haven’t put a lot of effort into making it sound good, or that the synth is just a toy that you can’t use to make actual music.

On the contrary, the sounds of Triple Cheese may surprise you, but you must keep in mind that this is a plugin that’s presented as a generator of “cheesy” sounds – hence the name. And by cheesy sounds the developers mean the retro sounds of the “early 1980s digital synths”. Depending of the music you make, this can actually be a very useful tool.

Triple Cheese doesn’t use subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis, frequency modulation, or any other classic method of synthesis. Instead of using oscillators, it generates its sound with the help of three comb filter modules. To each filter you can assign various parameters, and you can further adjust the sounds with effects such as chorus, flanger, phaser, delay, or reverb, and through two envelopes and two LFOs.

You can also play with the synth’s 170 presets that have suggestive names like HS Emmentaler, b78 Mozarella, or bio Gorgonzola Express. Well, I know what I’m eating tonight. I can only conclude that, for a free synth, Triple Cheese is great.