Best Software Synths

Want to fulfil your dream of being a creative music producer, even without any experience? Music Maker lets you get started right away. Simply choose sounds from a massive collection of beats, tunes and vocals at chart quality level. Combine sounds and loops per drag & drop, play a whole library of software instruments and apply professional effects. Choose sounds and loops from your favorite genre and combine them with virtual instruments on your timeline. Analog synthesizers, drums that pack real boom or elegant strings – they can all be applied with a single click. Form an entire band! Start recording your own melodies or vocals from the get-go. Just connect your MIDI keyboard, drum pad controller or microphone – that's all you need to do. Want to record a live guitar solo? No problem. You're free to customize each and every element for your groove. Create a track that's one of a kind. Drag & drop to apply professional effects to your sounds, loops, instruments and vocals.

Reason is a powerful collection of fantastic instruments, synthesizers and effects for you to create endless amazing sounds and music. Use it as a plugin with your favorite DAW or produce music in Reason standalone. Sound Packs are like musical building blocks that just sound perfect together. Sound Packs are filled with Reason patches (aka presets) that are powerful combinations of various Reason devices, made by world-class sound designers. With new Sound Packs every week, you’ve always got somewhere to turn for some inspiration.

Concept 2 is everything you want in a modern synth plugin, beautiful sounds without the complexity of operation found in many other synths. Your time is valuable, and so we wanted to give you access to a rich sound design palette without having to spend time learning how to use it. With Concept 2, you can get lost in the music, not the manual. We designed Concept 2 for musicians, producers, composers, sound designers, and post-production professionals who want to create sounds fast. Here are just some of the highlights of the benefits of creating sounds with Concept 2. With tons of great-sounding presets from top artists, including Roni Size, Richard Devine, and Kayla Painter, there’s every chance you’ll find a sound that works right out of the box. Cinematic lush pads, organic soundscapes, stirring strings, killer bass synths, screaming leads, and more. Presets are a great starting point, but Concept 2 gives you access to almost limitless routing parameters to shape the sound.

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.

Nanoloop is a comprehensive sequencer, synthesizer, and sampler application optimized for mobile devices, ensuring smooth performance across a wide range of phones and tablets, including older and low-end models. Its adaptable interface accommodates any screen resolution, featuring customizable font and icon sizes, as well as light and dark color schemes. The app offers an intuitive sequencer suitable for both rhythm and melody creation, with automation capabilities for all parameters. It provides eight channels, each configurable as either a synth or sampler, and supports up to eight patterns per channel. Users can load samples from an SD card, record via the microphone, trim samples, and even re-sample. Nanoloop's polyphonic FM, PWM, and noise synths, combined with a song editor featuring a loop function, facilitate intricate music composition. The app enables project sharing via email and is compatible with its iOS counterpart.

The Korg KAOSSILATOR PRO+ is a dynamic phrase synthesizer and loop recorder that allows users to create and perform multi-layered music across various genres with a simple touch of the X/Y touchpad. It features 250 sound programs, including 62 new additions, covering styles such as hip-hop, house, dubstep, and rock. The loop recording function supports up to four measures, enabling intuitive performance and track creation with four infinitely stackable loop banks. Users can set musical scales and keys to ensure accurate performances, and the gate arpeggiator function facilitates easy phrase control via a slider. The device includes line and mic inputs for recording external audio sources, and its USB MIDI capability allows it to function as a versatile MIDI controller. Additionally, the KAOSSILATOR PRO+ supports saving loop data and external WAV files on SD/SDHC cards, with dedicated editor software available for managing sample data and settings.

Roland Zenbeats is a music creation app that keeps you in an effortless artistic flow. Get started on any device or platform. With its collection of both modern and legendary sounds, Zenbeats brings Roland’s history of innovation into a new, accessible format. Whether you’re an emerging musician or an established producer, Zenbeats makes music creation easy. Make beats, take lessons, and sample the world around you. Wherever you are, no matter what platform or device you use, capture your creative spark with Zenbeats. ZC1 is a new plug-in synthesizer using Roland’s ZEN-Core Synthesis System. Available in Zenbeats as a free instrument, ZC1 has 60 presets and a sleek touch-based interface. Use the XY pad for Resonance and Cutoff or other parameters. Plus, unlock ZC1 to share sounds with ZENOLOGY and ZEN-Core-compatible hardware and get around 900 additional preset tones and 90 built-in MFX effects. These sounds cover a wide range from acoustic and electronic to ethnic instruments.

Synthesizers are in just about every style of modern music, so you need something versatile, authentic, and forward-thinking. ZENOLOGY embodies nearly 50 years of synthesizer research and development. Its roots go back to the dawn of synthesis. Its future will reshape your relationship with sound. For decades, Roland sounds have had a massive influence on music. A string of legendary instruments defined genres like techno, house, rap, trap, and hip hop, and deeply influenced pop, rock, and film music. This experience has culminated in the ZEN-Core Synthesis System. It’s the most advanced sound engine we’ve ever made, powering our professional synthesizers like JUPITER-X and FANTOM, used on stages and in studios around the world. ZENOLOGY is an expandable plug-in version of the ZEN-Core Synthesis System. ZEN-Core is based on discrete synth voices,each containing a flexible oscillator, filter, amplifier, dual step-LFOs, and lush effects.

Roland Cloud is an evolving cloud-based suite of software synthesizers, drum machines, and sampled instruments for modern creators. Harness the vast power of the ZEN-Core Synthesis System and dive deep into the world of custom sound design with ZENOLOGY Pro. For nearly fifty years, Roland has delivered memorable, genre-defining sounds. And a big part of that sonic footprint is our unique approach to effects processing. The swirling JUNO chorus, feedback-drenched tape echo, and other sounds have left their mark on countless tracks over the decades, and with ZENOLOGY FX, you can now add that flavor to any keyboard sound or instrument track right inside your DAW. With over 90 processors to choose from, there's a wealth of ways to make your synth sounds come alive. Add delays to arps, larger-than-life modulation effects to chord progressions, and twist and distort basses and lead tones that leap from the speakers.

Experiment with rack-style modular patching using blocks. Discover 70+ included instruments plus thousands of sounds in the user library. Reaktor 6 is the ultimate creative toolkit for deep sound exploration, featuring cutting-edge DSP and high-fidelity sound. Reaktor is the beating heart that gives life to synths like Native’s Razor and Monark, as well as third-party releases from Twisted Tools, Tim Exile, Blinksonic, and many more. It’s a sandbox for sound creation – a limitless platform for experimenting and diving into new sound directions. Simply put, Reaktor lets you build instruments to replicate the sounds in your head – in a way that existing instruments can’t. Reaktor's trademark sound quality is unmistakable. From anti-aliased oscillators and ZDF (zero delay feedback) filters to granular synthesis engines, a team of leading developers builds every component in Reaktor from the core level up.

Omnisphere is the flagship synthesizer of Spectrasonics, an instrument of extraordinary power and versatility. Top artists all over the world rely on Omnisphere as an essential source of sonic inspiration. This award-winning software brings many different types of synthesis together into one amazing-sounding instrument that will spark a lifetime of exploration. Omnisphere is the only software synth in the world to offer a hardware synth Integration feature. This remarkable innovation transforms over 65 well-known hardware synthesizers into extensive hands-on controllers that unlock Omnisphere's newly expanded synthesis capabilities. Simply put, this ground-breaking feature makes using Omnisphere feel just like using a hardware synth. By bridging the physical experience gap between software and hardware, users gain intuitive control of Omnisphere by using the familiar layout of their supported hardware synth.

Vanguard2, developed by reFX, is a virtual analog synthesizer that offers a blend of classic and modern sound design capabilities. This updated version introduces a cleaner, vector-based user interface that is resizable to accommodate various screen resolutions. It features ten new wavetables, two additional filter types, a new delay mode, an enhanced reverb, and a new distortion effect, expanding its sonic versatility. The advanced librarian system provides three columns for easy navigation, color-coded tags, bookmarks, and favorites, and a dedicated location for user presets, facilitating efficient sound management. Vanguard2 is compatible with all existing Vanguard1 projects and libraries, ensuring seamless integration for users upgrading from the previous version. The synthesizer includes 2,440 sound presets across 23 categories and 63 one-shot drum samples, offering a comprehensive toolkit for music production. It supports major digital audio workstations.

NEXUS, developed by reFX, is a powerful software synthesizer designed to streamline music production with high-quality sounds and an intuitive interface. It features a vast library of over 2,000 factory presets, organized into categories such as arpeggios, basses, leads, pads, and more, catering to various musical genres. The advanced librarian system offers three columns for easy navigation, color-coded tags, bookmarks, favorites, and a dedicated location for user presets, facilitating efficient sound management. NEXUS includes a comprehensive suite of effects, including reverb, delay, chorus, phaser, and distortion, allowing users to enhance and customize their sounds directly within the plugin. The arpeggiator features 16 layers, each with its own pattern and settings, enabling the creation of complex sequences and rhythms. NEXUS also supports expansion packs, providing access to additional sounds and presets tailored to specific genres or styles.

Syndt is a high-quality polyphonic synthesizer with a lot of possibilities. The oscillator waveform can be morphed between pure sine to pure square and supports altering of pulse width. Both the shape and pulse width can be modulated by two independent LFOs. With fine-tuned low pass and high pass filters combined with a separate filter attack setting, (optionally based on velocity) this synth can create some raw and interesting sounds. The additional LFO can be shaped exactly as the oscillator and optionally controls filters, gain, and pitch (using a modulation wheel or just automatically). This LFO can be synchronized to an AUv3 host. Globally there’s a nice stereo chorus, ping-pong stereo delay (that also can sync to an AUv3 host BPM), and EQ. XY pad-based oscillator and LFO (PWM on the X axis and morphs between sine and square on the Y axis). Independent mini-LFO (sine only) for each axis of the oscillator XY-pad.