My Five Favorite Soft Synths
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

4. Image-Line Sytrus

Most music-production software these days comes with a couple of basic built-in synthesizers, at the very least. I debated limiting my list of favorites to third-party plugins, but in the end Sytrus was just too cool to ignore. (There was another debate about whether to give the tip to Sytrus or to Mπlstrom, the extraordinary synth in Propellerhead Reason. It was a close call.)

Sytrus is available as an optional add-on for Image-Line FL Studio, the program formerly known as FruityLoops, and is bundled in the XXL version. At heart it’s a six-operator FM (frequency modulation) synth, a design first seen in the early ’80s in Yamaha’s enormously successful DX7.

Sytrus will load DX7 patches, in fact. But it goes much further, thanks to its three resonant filters with waveshaping, built-in effects, plucked-string algorithm, additive waveform designer, and syncable, looping multisegment envelopes. A single patch can use more than 50 envelopes, not including the multisegment amplitude contours for the LFOs.

As I noted in a review of FL Studio for a recent issue of Electronic Musician, Sytrus is not free of quirks. Those great envelopes, for instance, can’t respond to key velocity, which strips off some of the subtleties you might like to program into certain types of keyboard patches. Even so, the sheer variety of timbres it will produce, ranging from warm pads, Hammond organ clones, and punchy basses to one-finger percussion grooves, makes it a winner.

Sytrus’s multi-segment envelopes can sync to the tempo, and you can edit the slope of individual segments by dragging the little circles. The knob matrix on the right is for programming audio signal routings for FM, filtering, and effects.