1986 is the latest addition to The Crow Hill Company’s Vaults series, and it’s available in AU, VST, VST3, and AAX formats for macOS and Windows.
As always, Vaults releases are free to download for six months before moving into the donationware category. At which point, they are available to purchase with a £3 donation, and all proceeds go to charity.
1986 is an instrument inspired by various aspects of 80s pop culture.
The 80s, and 1986 in particular, is a period when synths were the driving force behind hit songs and hit movies, and often the core element in the soundtrack of daily life.
The Crow Hill Company references iconic movies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club as inspiration for 1986.
If you know those movies, you’ll know the standard formula of care-free attitude meeting teenage angst to create the realisation that it’s time to take a look in the mirror, and right some wrongs.
The sound of that realisation is often a blend of synth bells, pads, and strings because you can create a lot of rhythm and emotion with them, to fit different stages of the soundtrack.
To get that sound, The Crow Hill Company sampled a pristine Sequential Circuits Prophet VS.
I said 1986 is inspired by the Prophet VS because, while it’s a faithful recreation of particular sounds, it’s not a full emulation.
1986 also features sounds taken from Roland’s JX3P, and an interesting Wurlitzer layer.
The sound of the 80s still divides opinion, but if you’re a fan of 80s movies and pop music, you’ll love this freebie.
It’s emotive, melodic, percussive, and evolving to some extent. So, you can cover a lot of ground with 1986.
1986 features the standard Vaults interface, with two large dials and four small ones.
The first large dial is EP, a vintage Wurlitzer layer that’s slightly detuned. I really like this idea; the Wurly adds width and a solid harmonic bed under the sharper synth tones, making 1986 more versatile.
The second of the large dials is Expression, and as you’d do with an orchestral patch, you can vary this parameter on the fly to control and guide the emotional impact.
The small dials start with Chorus, which lets you add more width, or push further down the detuned path, if you want a more distinct character.
You then have two delays: a quarter-beat delay and a quarter-triplet delay. These delays are great for rhythmic content and filling a little space when you don’t want to play more, which is always useful in composition.
A convolution reverb completes the built-in effects and small dials, and it’s typical for these 80s sounds to showcase both extremes of reverb.
The percussive nature of the sound sounds great with almost no reverb at all when used to drive rhythm and motion. In movie terms, the same sounds are often drenched in reverb in later scenes to hammer home the intended emotion.
I think the message here is that if you haven’t seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, go watch it right now, then make some music.
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Last Updated on March 30, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
