Deconstructing Presets for U-he’s DIVA Synth

U-he’s synthesiser DIVA captures the essence of the old hardware synths designed and sold from the 1970’s to the 1990’s.

Those synths were relatively basic when compared to today’s crazy wavetable oscillators found in digital synths like MassiveX or Serum or futuristic physical models like Plasmonic or the utter madness of Dawesome’s Novum (honestly, check that out - it’s like devs are finally looking to do completely original things, and makes you wonder what else could be hidden in developers hard drives..) but the cleverly designed oscillators and well-tuned filters can make noises which are just as powerful and interesting as those from more ‘futuristic’ synths.

DIVA is a semi-modular synth into which you can pick and choose which oscillator, filter and envelope styles you want, and that is where the power is. Fancy shoving a fat moog-style saw wave into a Roland-style filter; no problem!

But they also massively enhanced the modulation possibilities by adding a MODIFICATIONS tab where you can affect the modulation signals (quantizing an LFO, or slewing/smoothing an envelope for example) prior to them affecting the sound; there is plenty of modulation power here, you just gotta learn how to harness it :)

This video deconstructs 3 relatively simple presets from DIVA and explores why the patch designers chose to configure it the way they did.