There is nothing like best or favorite synths, it’s more about how comfortable one is with the synth and how much the person knows about the synths and its features. The more you try to master one synth, the more comfortable you get with it and you get the sound you have in your head. I am listing out 5 synths that are really good for electronic music production.
Xfer Records Serum
The Serum is a beast. For me, it’s the go to the plugin as it has amazing presets of the best sound quality. It’s extremely easy to use. If you are a person who likes to tweak around and go in-depth into tones, it can do a lot of things like creating own wavetables, making customized LFO shapes etc. Just like few other synths you have the 1/4th, 1/8th etc options for the oscillation. You can make amazing wobbles with these. The Serum has loads of expansion packs which make it more easier to get the sounds you want easily.
Native Instruments Massive
Massive is everyone’s favorite synth for music production. Every producer will have a phase where he uses massive literally on all of his tracks. Massive has three oscillators which control pitch, wavetables, and amp. The best part is a variety of waveforms can be used for 3 oscillators with which in-depth sound design can be done. There are filters available which can be assigned to the LFO’s. When the dubstep genre was at its peak, most of the growls were made using massive. More than presets, a lot of new sounds can be generated easily on Massive.
ReFX Nexus 2
Nexus2 is a synth which contains over 1000 patches that are apt for Electronic music production. One big advantage for Nexus is that it is very preset centric, that everything is ready to go and no real big tweaks are needed. The presets are so good that it immediately takes your track to a whole new level. The other big plus for nexus is that it uses very little CPU so it really won’t take a toll on your system and the sounds load so easily. The filters are very easy to understand and are very straightforward. It also has an arpeggiator which can make different arps, and they also have presets. It has straightforward filters and the cutoff knob and other knobs are seen clearly and can be tweaked very easily.
Native Instruments Monark
Monark is used predominantly for house music. Monark sounds close to a Minimoog. It has vintage sounding presets and good presets for house music. Just like other synths, this has its oscillators and MM Filter. It is different from the other synths because it loads inside Native Instruments Reaktor player.
Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2
Omnisphere by Spectrasonics is a hybrid synthesizer that allows users to dive deeper into sound design. Omnisphere includes loads of sounds in its sound library. It pretty much has major features like atmospheres, synth leads, fx, ethnic sounds, and percussive sounds. Omnisphere has a browser to navigate the huge sound library and tags can be added to each sound to help remember. The sound library is around 50gb and every sound is of extremely high quality. There is a live mode option in this plugin where a musician can move from one preset to the other without any issues. This is one unique feature. You can also layer up to 8 different sounds in one plugin which is really good when you want to make your sound fat. Omnisphere also has an arpeggiator which is really cool because it also has presets with which you can tweak around. It’s a really good synth with which you can make crazy new sounds and new electronic sounds.
Author Bio
Author Vishal Ramakrishnan, Global Peace song of the year award winning and music producer. He is also a music production trainer. For more details, visit www.vishaladitya.com
This article is published in the October 2017 issue: http://bit.ly/2g8BGdK
