Cheap Keys

What it does

A sample-based instrument of 1980s and 1990s home keyboard sounds, around 200 of them across brass, guitars, keys, mallets, pads, pianos, strings, synths and wind, with 200 MIDI phrases that load the matching instrument when you play them. Each sound runs through an amp envelope, a filter with its own envelope and velocity, an LFO offering vibrato, tremolo and wobble, tuning and transpose, a large reverb and a tempo-synced delay.

In the demo

Jade plays it in AUM alongside Scaler and Fuego, builds pads out of the amp envelope and LFO, and stretches the reverb decay until it stops behaving like a room. She browses by instrument group and by search, and points out that the raw sounds come out very loud.

Worth knowing

It is iPad only. The MIDI phrases cannot be dragged into a host the way the desktop version allows, which the developer told Jade is being worked on, so anyone buying it for those phrases is buying a promise. Desktop versions in AU, VST and AAX come from the Sonic Nomad site.