Ollie Nicklin has released Void Wave, a free dual-oscillator wavetable synthesizer for macOS and Windows.
Void Wave is the first plugin from Ollie Nicklin, a solo developer who learned JUCE and built the synth because he couldn’t find one that nailed the sounds he actually wanted to play.
His feature shortlist was pretty specific. The synth needed big, detuned basses, proper acid movement, and solid pads. So instead of shopping for another general-purpose everything-synth like Vital, he built Void Wave to excel at those types of sounds.
The plugin is currently in beta (v0.9) and comes free with no account, activation, or subscription. There’s a Ko-fi link if you want to tip the developer, but it’s not required.
The synthesis engine has two wavetable oscillators, each with 64 slots (nine factory wavetables plus the option to import your own single-cycle WAVs or AIFFs). The tables run at 256 frames × 2048 samples with 4× internal oversampling, and you can play them in Single, Morph, or Scan mode (the latter auto-advances through the wavetable at up to 4 Hz).
Each oscillator can stack up to eight unison voices with adjustable detune and stereo width, and the two oscillators can be combined via Blend, Ring Mod, Hard Sync, or true linear FM.
The filter section offers eight topologies, including a Huovilainen Moog-style LP24 ladder that self-oscillates cleanly, Simper TPT state-variable filters, a comb filter with pitch-tracked delay, and a three-band formant filter for vowel-style character. There’s also pre-filter arctangent drive with key and velocity tracking.
The filters sound very good, and I’d love to see them released as a separate plugin at some point. We already have plugins like Filtronix for handling multiple filter types, but it wouldn’t hurt to get these separately, too.
Modulation is handled by three DAHDSR envelopes (filter, amp, and a free assignable one), two LFOs with seven shapes and tempo sync, and a 12-slot mod matrix routing 15 sources to 19 destinations. Polyphony goes up to 16 voices.
One of the more interesting touches is the “analog character” system, which is always on and adds Brownian pitch drift to each voice. There’s subtle wavetable position drift, micro-LFOs on every unison voice, a 3-cent transistor-settling blip on every note-on, and 2% asymmetric saturation at the filter input.
This is supposed to give the synth that slightly imperfect quality you get from hardware, and I haven’t noticed it much while testing, but the sound is definitely good.
If you need more coloring options, there is a four-stage serial FX chain with Distortion (five flavors including foldback and bitcrusher), Modulation (chorus, ensemble, flanger, phaser), Delay (mono, ping-pong, stereo, with tempo sync), and Reverb (size, damping, pre-delay, with Room/Hall/Plate modes).
The plugin currently comes with 109 factory presets, and the developer is collecting user-submitted preset banks for future versions.
The interface has a nice hardware-inspired look, but I do think some of the text could be bigger. On my MacBook Air, the section labels are pretty tiny, and the FX stage labels (Distortion, Modulation, Delay, Reverb) in particular had me squinting and leaning closer to the screen.
You can still tell the filter from the LFO at a glance, but those smaller labels are a fair bit of work to read on a laptop.
One thing worth flagging for Mac users: the installer is unsigned, so macOS Gatekeeper blocked it on my first attempt. This is normal for indie developers because paying Apple to sign installers isn’t cheap. The workaround is to approve the installation manually in the System Settings.
Of course, only do this if you trust the source, and install at your own risk (my MacBook didn’t explode).
Void Wave is available as a VST3 for Windows 10+ (x64) and as VST3, AU, and Standalone for macOS 11+ (Universal Binary, Apple Silicon, and Intel).
Download: Void Wave (FREE)
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Last Updated on May 14, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
