Renegade Soundplay High Score is James Richmond’s’ Software Product Of 2020, he explains why.

High Score is a virtual instrument based around 1980’s video game sound generators, and my Product of the Year for 2020. I’ve been obsessed with chip tune sounds for a number of years now, having owned a variety of hardware products (such as the Electron Sidstation and Twisted Electrons TherapSid), as well as a few Eurorack modules of a similar type. Until recently I’d never found a plugin equivalent that felt as good to use as the hardware. That is until I started using High Score by Renegade Soundplay.



Renegade Soundplay is the company founded by ex-Moog and Line 6 employee David Molnar and High Score is the first product issued by this company and it is fantastic. Running within Native Instruments’ Kontakt or Kontakt Player software, the plugin is very easy to use and sounds excellent, in that slightly messed up and lo-fi chip tune style.

The interface is comprised of four main windows named ‘Generator’, ‘Filter’, ‘Arpeggiator’ and ‘Effects’. These are pretty self explanatory, in Generator you can select and control wave types, envelopes, noise and the mono/poly state of each patch. In Filter you can select from four main filter types as either 2 or 4 pole variants and filter envelope as well. The dual 16 stepped arpeggiators can be chained to give up to 32 steps and can be set with a tempo independent of the host. Effects are comprised of a delay and speaker simulator to give a TV, console or portable device simulation.

The plugin ships with a number of excellent presets but my favourite features of the plugin are two buttons marked ‘Random’ and ‘Mutate’. As I have a marked interest in non-deterministic compositional processes, I love any product that give me the ability to randomise settings at the push of a button. High Score has two variations on this theme.

Firstly Random will allow you to specify a patch type - options are Lead, Bass, Drum/Perc, Jump, Coin/Take, Hit, Explosion, Power Up and Laser. Settings will be randomised based on a patch type loosely following that categorisation. Or, if you are feeling brave, you can select ‘Total Random’, for some unexpected audio chaos.

Mutate is more subtle, it takes an existing patch, whatever you have currently selected, and randomises parameters and settings within that patch, to get something like the original patch, but just a bit different (or if you keep pressing the ‘Mutate’ button, perhaps a lot different.)

Without these two randomisers the plugin would still be a terrific product but Random and Mutate take it to a new level for me. David Molnar has done an excellent job with this product and I can’t wait to see what the company produces next. High Score from Renegade Soundplay is my software Product of the Year for 2020.