What if titans like Vital, Serum, Phase Plant and Pigments didn’t exist? Here are today’s coolest ‘alt’ synths for the contrarians and the experimentalists
Audio technology is capable of astonishing feats. From the most faithful capturing of analogue oscillation to the most advanced modulation and processing you can imagine, today’s top synths use these technological heights to their advantage. But so do the synths that aren’t hitting the big leagues, and others that have been treading their own path.
Today’s top synths need no introduction, but there are plenty more options laying slightly lower in the background. For every Arturia Pigments and u-he Hive, there are at least a couple of alternative options that haven’t been quite as successful. Some aimed to make it big but didn’t catch the right wind – others bravely trod their own path, offering a completely different experience that was never expected to be a mainstream phenomenon. It’s these synths that we’ll discuss here.
Physical modelling has undergone a small resurgence recently, with a few synths appearing in the last few months. Reason Studios’ Objekt made a dent in public consciousness, with its versatile setup allowing a bevy of sounds and textures to be made. Objekt has a real-world sound that fits right into Reason, and the workflow and possibilities you get through using it with the rest of the DAW are very expansive.
Meanwhile in the physical modelling space, Physical Audio’s Modus, also recently launched, offers a ‘fantasy’ instrument setup combining strings and plates connected together by springs and rattles. It’s a synth that requires a bit of work to get started with, and it’s got a sound all its own. We’ll take you through the basics in this tutorial, with a few steps to get you running with the main features of Modus.
Newfangled Audio’s Pendulate takes a similar modelling-based approach to its oscillators, but this time those oscillators are inspired by oscillations in the real world: sources like turbines and vortices that would – as once imagined – make for nice synth sounds when scaled up into the audio range. As it turns out, they did, and we’ll show you how to get the most out of this synth as well. In AI Land, the previously long-in-the-tooth Synplant has received a major ‘v2’ upgrade, and has added a few interesting new features. Alongside the lovely ‘DNA’ view, where you set various settings for each patch, there’s also a new mode that can load a sample and extrapolate it out across the entire keyboard with more than just simple tuning adjustments underlying it all. We’ll be taking that for a spin as well.
First up, though, something that’s all the more traditional, but certainly still quite different: Cherry Audio’s Sines synth lets you build both analogue and digital-style patches using only sin
