Surge is well-known in the music production community due to it being open-source, meaning that it’s free and you can actually download the source code and modify it, and that it comes with a huge bank of sweet presets! Image credit: Vember Audio / Surge Team Check and download: GitHub

If you do want to support the developers and have the means to do so, you can purchase different packages that include more wavetables, more presets, a text-to-wavetable feature, and if you subscribe, you can get first access to their new plugins and features when they roll out.īut if you just want to use an awesome, capable synth, you can leave your wallet at home! It follows, then, that this synth can do just about everything Serum can do, but it’s free. It operates in pretty much the same ways, with the layouts being quite similar as well.

If you’re familiar with Serum, this synth will feel like home to you. It has a super-simple modulation setup in the form of a click-and-drag model, where you can assign LFOs, envelopes, and even frequency modulation to nearly any parameter. This synth was designed to talk, but is capable of just about anything you can imagine. Some things to love about Vital are its three oscillators and one sampler, two stereo-splittable filters, and one-of-a-kind vocoding processing.

This synth is number one by a mile, largely due to the fact that there are expensive, complicated synths that can’t keep up with this one. It seems unbelievable that Vital is free. Image credit: Vital Audio / Matt Tytel Check and download: Vital Audio

Fm synthesis vst