Kilohearts Phase Plant
Phase Plant’s open modular architecture gives you the freedom to design anything from compact synths to complex evolving patches within an ecosystem that is fun and intuitive to use. Combine as many generators, modulators, and effects as you need to create your own unique sounds with precision and ease. Choose from regular waveforms, wavetables, samples, and noise for your source sounds. Make use of an extensive selection of factory wavetables or design your own with Phase Plant’s advanced wavetable editor. Start with solid foundations to create original layers and combinations of sounds within one synth. Phase Plant comes with Kilohearts Essentials, a large range of useful effects plugins. These are all available as snapins to be combined and modulated as you desire in Phase Plant’s three effects lanes. Keep all your FX processing right inside Phase Plant and baked into your presets. Premium Effects are available to buy separately to further bolster your sound design capabilities.
Learn more
Hive 2
Hive 2, developed by u-he, is a versatile software synthesizer designed to deliver high-quality sound with a streamlined workflow. It features two oscillators capable of generating standard waveforms or 2D wavetables, each supporting up to 16x unison and tunable sub-oscillators. The synthesizer offers three distinct synth engines, normal, dirty, and clean, allowing users to tailor the character of their sounds. Hive 2 includes a drag-and-drop modulation assignment system, a 12-slot modulation matrix with modifiers, and four user-definable XY control pads for dynamic sound manipulation. Additional features comprise an arpeggiator, a step sequencer with real-time recording, a unique 8-step shape sequencer with four independent outputs, and seven rearrangeable effects, distortion, chorus, delay, phaser, EQ, reverb, and compressor. The interface is resizable from 70% to 200% and offers an alternative Izmo skin. Hive 2 comes with over 2,400 NKS-ready factory presets.
Learn more
Qithesizer
Qithesizer is a powerful multi-engine hybrid software synthesizer designed with wind controllers in mind, combining virtual analog, wavetable, and physical modeling synthesis into one versatile platform. It features two wavetable oscillators, four physical instrument models, three noise generators, three classical filters, two envelope generators, two LFOs, four modulation slots, 11 modulation sources, and 18 modulation destinations, allowing users to craft their own unique sounds. The app includes a patch library for immediate sound creation and supports playability via keyboards and other MIDI controllers, making it accessible even for beginners without prior synthesis knowledge. Real-time visualizations provide visual feedback synchronized with performances, enhancing confidence during play. Qithesizer is available on iPad, iPhone, and Mac (requiring an Apple M1 chip or later), and supports AUv3 format for integration with hosts on iPad, iPhone, and DAWs like Logic Pro on Mac.
Learn more
Serum
The dream synthesizer did not seem to exist, a wavetable synthesizer with a truly high-quality sound, visual and creative workflow-oriented interface to make creating and altering sounds fun instead of tedious, and the ability to “go deep” when desired - to create/import/edit/morph wavetables, and manipulate these on playback in real-time. Serum has a wavetable editor built right in, you can create your own wavetables in a variety of ways. Import audio directly from audio files. Serum has a variety of methods and options for analyzing audio for breaking it apart into individual waveforms. You can import single-cycle wavetables of course, as well as many at once (with in-built sorting options, or manual re-ordering). Morph between various wavetables using standard linear interpolation (crossfading) or via harmonic/spectral morphing. Draw directly on the waveform, with optional grid-size snapping and a variety of shape tools.
Learn more