I mean obviously there’s Serum, Vital, and Phase Plant and all the popular ones, but what do you find yourself using?

My current rotation is:

  • Phonec by Psychic Modulation. Really dreamy synth meant to sound like a nature documentary from 1984. Very Boards of Canada.

  • Repro-5 by u-he. Really nifty emulation of the Prophet 5.

  • VCV Rack. The best software version of a modular synthesizer rack around. You can get lost for hours in sound design. Also it’s free!

  • Dawesome Abyss. Honestly a little finicky and difficult to use but can make some super thick pads.

  • QasarBeach by Adam Strange - It’s free! Super crunchy recreation of a Fairlight CMI IIx. Probably the most impressive free softsynth I’ve ever used, and it’s more than that! It has a tracker, waveform editor, sampler, a ton of stuff. The GUI is just beautiful. It’s really really hard to use and clunky, but it’s just got so much soul and love put into it that I can’t help but poke around in it sometimes.

What do y’all enjoy using? Also this is a great comm idea and I hope we have lots of cool threads! flag-non-binary-pride

  • thelarchmage [they/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    +1 on VCV Rack, I use it more than anything else, and my whole first album was made exclusively using free modules there. I do get some of the premium modules there, mostly to support developers who put their time and effort into making the vast majority of the modules free.

    I’m currently trying to get into Bespoke Synth, the DAW that describes itself as “If you took a hammer to Ableton and told someone to put it all back together on their own for each project”. It’s got similar UI to things like Max with elements you wire up like a modular synthesizer, but with live-coding in python and VST hosting and such. And it’s free.

    I also really want to get into playing around with Vital Synth, I’ve heard it’s really powerful and also free, and can run as a VST.

    Finally, I use Minifreak V a lot, as I have the hardware Minifreak and it works well with syncing the hardware with the software, and it also just got the 3.0 firmware update today with sample engine and seven granular algs. Really, really powerful soft synth, but also money.