Synth1 is said to be the most downloaded VST plugin of all times. And for a good reason:

  • it’s free, also from bugs, stable and super light-weight. You can download it anytime from its homepage
  • it is a decent subtractive synth with all the fundamental features one needs. As such, I would say it is comparable with Sylenth!
  • has tons of free to download banks on the Internet

Basically, you can shape a synthetic bass, some decent lead or a pad with ease. I ended up using it in nearly all of my tracks, sometimes as a lead voice, sometimes as an additional layer.

In other words, it’s a good, versatile, proven and reliable workhorse of a software synthesys.

When I first starting using it, though, which was many years ago, it left me with an impression of rather dull and too simplistic. A good part of this impression was due to the fact that I was not aware of the existence of a couple of killer features (actually, pretty standard ones for a synth like this, on a hindsight). These two features is what this article is about.

By the way, if are you a musician looking for collaboration, be invited to drop me a line at grechin.sergey(at)gmail.com! Be you a producer, vocalist, songwriter, let’s see what we can do together! Something to consider would be: checking our productions to help detect mixing glitches (have another pair of ears), mastering of our tracks and up to releasing something together.

So these are the features:

Fatty sounds with “unison”

image

this unison things seemingly duplicates the sound your oscillators provide and reaches this unique crispy chorus-like effect that I would call adding some grease to the sound. It was only when I start playing with this did I realize that this synth can actually be making some serious sound.

Lively velocity-dependent filter cutoff

Simply activate the “Vel” button, and, depending of how much you rotate the “trk” knob, your filter cutoff will depend on the velocity of the notes you take. That makes the sound, especially the one with clear attack and overall sharp character, way more livelier, especially when combined with the built in delay effect:

image

I hope you have found this info useful! Enjoy creating your new track with this great synth!