The 6 Best Free Synths for Music Production
- adammillsmusic
- Jul 24
- 10 min read
If you're looking for the best free synths to use in your productions, then you've come to the right place! In this blog post, I'm going to share 6 essential virtual instruments you should really check out: Vital, Surge XT, OB-Xd, Tyrell N6, Zebralette, and TAL-NoiseMaker.
TL:DR - The Noisemaker is my favourite!
First up, we have Vital, a high-end wavetable synth. This powerhouse features frequency and wave warping, stereo split LFOs, audio-rate modulation, and dual routable filters with both analogue and digital modes. Plus, it has really cool custom-shaped envelopes and a ton of built-in effects.
I really like the look and layout of Vital, and it's got a ton of great presets. If you click at the top, you've got loads of great presets to choose from, and you can sort them by category.
It's got a great sound about it. Definitely one to check out if you like that NI "Massive" sound. Also. if you like Serum, then this wavetable style of synthesis will be great for you.
Vital has three wavetable oscillators and one noise oscillator. On the left hand side, you've got macros, so you can assign multiple modulations to one control.
For each oscillator you can choose different wavetables. The way it works is there are loads of different frames for each wavetable, so you can choose a different frame to use statically or modulate it so that the frames change over time.
Then you've got two filters at the bottom (Filter 1 and Filter 2). You can choose which oscillators go through the filter by clicking them on and off.
You've got drawable envelopes in the top right that will shape the sound. And below that you've got your LFOs. If you want to modulate something, just find an LFO and drag and drop it onto whatever you want to modulate. For instance, if you wanted LFO 1, you select that, drag it, and drop it on the filter cutoff to modulate the cutoff.
You've got global controls at the bottom, like glide and the unison.
Then at the top you have a separate effects tab. You've got all many different effects to choose from (phaser, chorus, reverb, delay, distortion and more) and these are modulatable, which is really cool.
Vital Conclusions: It looks really good, it's pretty easy to use, and you can get some very interesting sounds with it. I think this is one of the best free synthesizers out there. It definitely sounds more like Serum or Massive; it has that wavetable sound, so it sounds slightly more digital, and not as warm as some of the other synths we're going to look at. That's not a fault; it's just the style of this particular synthesizer.
2. Surge XT - Free Download Here
Surge XT is an open-source hybrid synthesizer that was originally commercially available. It's particularly great for sound design, with multiple different synthesis modes, great filters, a highly flexible modulation engine, and strong community support. I personally love all the different types of oscillators it has.
What's really cool about this synth is that you've got two "scenes". So you've basically got two versions of the synth in one! You can either have it in single mode or dual mode, where it will play both A and B together. In scene A, you've got three oscillators, and in single mode, you'll just have access to those three. But if you come into dual mode, you'll run both A and B and get 6 oscillators stacked on top of each other!
The oscillators themselves are really cool. You've got a load of different ones to choose from, including classic, modern and virtual analogue waveforms. You've also got wavetable - similar to Vital, and you can cycle through many different wavetables. You can change the pitch, morph them, skew the vertical portion of the wave, saturate them, and change the formant. You can really do quite a lot with this; it's quite impressive.
There are loads of presets to choose from in the patch browser. Though in general, I'm not convinced Surge sounds as good as Vital. I also think it requires a little bit more work to get a good sound.
Other oscillators include sample and hold and noise. Then you've got 2 filters as well; Filter 1 and Filter 2 which you can change the type of. There is also a mixer section, which is really important because you've potentially got up to six different oscillators going on here. There's also to shape the sound there.
You've also got a large mod matrix section. If you want to automate the cutoff with an LFO, you click on LFO 1, click it again, and then choose what you want to modulate. You can change many characteristics of the LFOs - the rate, the phase, the amplitude, and the shape - so that's quite cool.
And we've got our effects over on this section on the right hand side. What I do think is pretty cool is you can change the filter configuration near the top, so you can quickly get some really interesting sounds.
In conclusion: I do like Surge XT but it's a bit difficult to work with than Vital. It does sound good but I'm not sure if it does sound as good. I find the GUI just a little bit more clunky, but you can do some really cool stuff with it. I think it goes much deeper if you are willing to explore.
Tal NoiseMaker is a super fun, unique, virtual analogue synth. I love this synth for several reasons - it sounds great, it's fairly easy to use and more importantly, it's the most fun to use! I constantly see myself smiling when I use this synth and can very easily get lost in sound design with it. It features free oscillators and some awesome routing options.
The interface is very simple. There are loads of presets in the top left corner, with different bass, leads, drums, FX and more.
Interestingly, it starts off with the LFOs first - LFO 1 and 2. Then you have Oscillator 1 and 2, so initially it looks like just 2 controllable oscillators. However, in the master section on the right side you can also bring up a sub-oscillator, kind of like a third, which is just a rectangle wave. You've also got the options to use ring modulation, transposing, and tuning options.
Next there's a filter section and amplitude section on the second row. Then you have a drawable envelope shape that you can apply to many different parameters things, like the filter or oscillators. It's very easily to just tweak random controls and end up with very crazy sounds, which is one of the reasons I love this free synth!
You've got an effects section down the bottom, containing a Roland - Juno like chorus, which sounds great. There's a few other effects: crush, reverb, and delay, which also just sound really good.
This is a much more simple synth than say Surge or Vital, but I think you can do so much with it. On your oscillators, you've only got a few waves to choose from (three on Osc 1, and five on Osc 2). However you can do pulse width modulation, or FM synthesis. So it opens up a lot possibilities.
You've got a little digital display in the bottom right that shows you what you're doing, and a few other global controls down the bottom.
In conclusion this is just a great little synth for experimentation and coming up with your own unique, interesting, different sounds. Which is rare for synthesizers - especially a free one! So I really love this TAL-NoiseMaker, and I think it might be my favorite of all the free synths available!
OB-Xd is a free virtual analogue synth modelled on the classic Oberheim OB-X. This synth has a rich and warm sound. I particularly love when you engage the unison on this synth and it generally does a great job at recreating the original.
This synth is probably the 'warmest' sounding synth on the list, which is to be expected as it's virtual analog. This means it doesn't sound as crispy or clear in the top end, but has a well rounded low end! It's a simpler synth in many ways than the ones we've looked at so far, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
It features two oscillators and a noise oscillator, you can use the mixer section to blend them together. You can change the pitch of the oscillators and the waveform of the oscillators as you would expect. The oscillators have pulse width modulation, so if you're using any pulse wave, you can change that.
If you want to make the synth sound a bit fatter, then engage the unison in the global controls. It's going to stack more voices, which you then spread wider using a bit of detuning.
Once it's been through the mixer section it runs through into the filter, which sounds great. You can change the cutoff, resonance and choose your filter type; low pass, high pass, band pass, what have you – really cool stuff!
And then you've got your modulation LFO. You can sync it, and you can choose what you're going to assign it to, such as frequency amount. You've got the filter envelope and amplifier envelope as well to shape the sounds. Then there's a voice variation section designed to introduce subtle, natural-sounding inconsistencies and unpredictability, mimicking the imperfections found in the original.
In terms of the GUI - it looks great. It's well labelled and designed and also easy to use. More importantly, it gives you a sample of that classic Oberheim sound! So I think this is another great free tool to have in your toolbelt.
This synth been developed by U-he in conjunction with Amazona.de. I like it because it's easy to get some quick, full-sounding bass sounds. Once again, it has more of an analogue sound to it than Vital or Surge. There's a lot of good presets and they really emulate the analogue sound well.
The GUI is pretty cool, quite easy to look at simply understand the signal flow, and it's quite easy just to make some lush sounds. You can very quickly get a good-sounding bass or something quite warm and rich.
The presets are found at the top. Or if you want to make your own - you've got 2 main oscillators to choose from here, with a few different shapes and you can control the balance in the mixer section. You've also got a separate sub-oscillator and noise oscillator, as well as a separate ring mod, and a feedback control.
Then you have your usual filter settings - cutoff and resonance. Once again, it's really easy to use. It kind of reminds me of like an old Roland SH-01 with the sliders. There's 2 LFOs down in the bottom left. You can change the rate, sync, depth, and the shape.
There's a basic modulation matrix in the centre at the bottom. Then you've got some envelopes, including the VCA (main amplitude). Then you've also got a second envelope that you can assign. Then to finish off you have a nice chorus effect.
It's a fairly simple synth, but it's just quite easy to get a nice sound out of quite quickly. It's fairly one-dimensional in what it can do, but it has a nice sound. You can make some good pads out of this, or some beefy leads but it's best at basses in my opinion.
Zebralette is a spectral synthesiser also from U-he. It's basically a light version of their synth Zebra 2, which I also really happen to like. Zebralette is a single-oscillator spectral synthesizer, and because of that, maybe it doesn't quite sound as full as some of the other synths on this list. That's not to say that there isn't good use cases for this sound. This one, I think, takes a bit more work to get it to sound as good as some of the others, but it definitely comes out with some interesting textures. I particularly like the way it does bell sounds.
So this one's a little bit different because it's a spectral synth, and technically it only has one oscillator, although you can stack up to 11 voices. You've got your presets in the usual place at the top. Immediately upon cycling through a few, I think you can hear that there's only one oscillator. It does sound a little bit thinner. When I run it through a spectrum analyzer such as Voxengo Span - it's clear that there are only a very few harmonics in these sounds.
So how does this work? You basically have the one oscillator which can be in single, dual, quad, or 11 voice mode. You can choose presets for your oscillators, detune them and play with the phase. You can choose the wavetable- this is called the Wave Warp.
You've got a load of different waves you can choose from, like different frames again, kind of like the wavetable synths, but this is spectral. You can very quickly edit these waveforms, which is quite cool. This is another synth that I think takes a bit more work to get it to sound good, but there are lots of possibilities within it.
What I quite like are the oscillator effects, which is similar to FM synthesis in a way. One control is like the modulator, and the other the destination - or the source and the target. These can then be modulated by LFOs and create some interesting sounds and textures.
There's also a mixer section with volume, width and panning. You can modulate these as well. You've got normal global settings; they're fairly standard.
You've got a regular VCA envelope but you also have an MSEG, so this is like an envelope that's quite dynamic. You can choose loads of these different envelope shapes, and you can also draw them in yourself.
There's also an effects section which is fairly simple. You can choose the modulation as a chorus, or a flanger, or a phaser. And then you've got a delay. The delay is quite cool I must say.
This is a bit harder to get a good sound out of, but you can get certainly some interesting sounds out of it. The interface is quite nice, though it could be a little confusing. There's a little bit of a learning curve with it, but overall, I do think this is quite a cool synth. I'd say this synth is great at doing pad sounds, maybe also some lead patches, but generally - textures and soundscapes. It does have more of a digital sound than a kind of analogue sound.
Which Free Synth is Your Favorite?
Let me know in the comments which one you like the most! Or if I have missed any! Personally, I'm a big fan of the TAL-NoiseMaker; I just find it the most fun and unique. Vital is super powerful too, and if you don't want to spend the money on Xfer Records - Serum, then this is a great free alternative.
If you want help learning to program synths or anything at all music production related, you can contact me here.
Take care,
Adam
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