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

  • LeylaLove [she/her, love/loves]
    ·
    7 hours ago

    I love Arturia's analog emulations. They're so fun to use, and they're really intuitive. One of the best pieces of software I've ever pirated lol

    Edit: Also have to say, am a serumpilled beatcel

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
      ·
      1 hour ago

      Arturia's version of the EMS Synthi is my favorite one. It's such an odd little machine and arturia got all the nuances of it. It's weird how retro and modern it can sound for a machine from the early 70s.