The best synth plugin on the market isn’t necessarily the most expensive one. You’ve probably heard that Serum, Sylenth and Pigments are the synth plugins you absolutely need to make music. But there’s a ton of free synth plugins that can hold their own against any of them.

• READ MORE: The best budget synthesizers to buy right now

We’ve used and tested a bunch of free virtual instruments, and thought about how they might fit into different music production workflows. Here are some wavetable, FM, virtual analogue, and modular synth plugins that are completely free and that might become your new favourite plugin.

Best Overall: Vital

Vital is a spectral warping wavetable synth that many consider to be a worthy alternative to Xfer’s Serum, with its straightforward drag-and-drop modulation interface and a unique text-to-wavetable feature. Vital’s GUI is extremely visually responsive with animated controls that show you where the filters, envelopes, and LFOs are interacting with the sound.

Vital offers amazing potential for creating and shaping unique wavetables with spectral warping processes that let you alter the harmonics rhythmically in real-time. Although there are four different versions of Vital, including a subscription and two paid options, each gives you access to the same high-quality sound design platform with different levels of additional content.

With its three oscillators and a sample-based sound generator, you have a wide sonic palette for traditional virtual analogue or cutting-edge digital sounds. When you combine Vital’s spectral warping and stereo modulation capabilities, you can create animated and evolving soundscapes or rhythmic patterns.

Download Vital at vital.audio

Best FM Synth: Digital Suburban Dexed

Dexed is a completely free, open-source FM synth available across macOS, Windows, and Linux which is a closely-modeled recreation of the famous Yamaha DX7. With its 6-operator FM engine, you can choose between three different emulation modes that mimic the sound of the hardware from different eras. These include the clean 24-bit Modern mode, the Mark I mode (close to the original DX7), and the OPL Series mode, which offers 8-bit chip emulation.

Naturally, you get all the classic DX7 patches like E.PIANO, TUB BELLS, and BASS 1 that were used on those legendary 1980s records from Whitney Houston, A-Ha, and Bon Jovi. Besides being a VST, VST3, AU, and LV2 format plugin, Dexed is also a MIDI librarian and patch manager for the DX7 and TX7 hardware, and because these synths are notoriously tricky to program, it becomes an essential software extension for owners of these classic FM synths.

Besides the ability to send and receive SysEx messages, Dexed also supports MPE for modern controllers like the Osmose and offers micro-tuning capabilities. Although it’s based on a vintage FM engine, Dexed is still a relevant sound creation platform, offering 144 parameters that are all accessible from the interface and can be automated in your DAW.

Dexed isn’t exactly beginner-friendly, since it’s rather complex, but it is light on the CPU, so you can run it on older computers without any issues. Arguably, the most exciting aspect is the world of free patches you get access to due to the cult status of the DX7.

Download Dexed at kvraudio.com

Best for bass music: Callybeat Hum808X

If you’re looking to create genres like Bass Music, Trap, and Drill, Callybeat Hum808X is a hybrid synth that combines additive and FM synthesis with three oscillators providing five waveform types. Although it was originally designed for the creation of 808-style kicks and sub-basses, Hum808X has evolved, offering a wider scope of sounds.

Within its FM synthesis engine, Hum808X has a sampler that functions as a modulator for controlling the frequency of the oscillators. With this hybrid approach to synthesis, you can introduce unique harmonics and realistic textures that aren’t possible using sine waves exclusively. Hum808X also includes a collection of 90 samples specially chosen for this purpose.

This allows you to add metallic timbres and percussive textures to bass sounds, helping them translate easily on small speaker systems like laptops, smartphones, and AirPods. For building sounds, there are 16 filter types, and one ADSR envelope for each oscillator and a global envelope to shape the entire sound.

You can also spread sounds with up to 16 unison voices and add expression with the glide control to match the rhythmic signature of your bassline. Meanwhile, to add the final touch, Hum808X is also equipped with a range of built-in effects, including distortion, compression, EQ, limiting, delay, and reverb.

Hum808X is an intuitive sound creation tool for modern music genres and a worthy alternative to popular plugins like SubLab that allows even beginners to get inspiring results quickly. The only drawback is that it’s not available for macOS, so Mac users will need an additional plugin host like PlugInGuru Unify to port it across.

Download Hum808X at callybeat.com

Best for Sound Design: Surge XT

Surge XT is a bi-timbral hybrid synth that provides extensive sound design tools with traditional virtual-analogue subtractive, wavetable, and FM synthesis processes. Until 2018, when it became open-sourced, Surge XT was a commercially available software synth from Vember Audio, but since then, it has been expanded considerably by volunteers within the active global user community.

Each of the two independent layers or “scenes” gives you access to three oscillators with a range of 12 selectable sound generation methods, including algorithms such as Classic and Modern virtual analogue modes, Wavetable, 2- or 3-modulator FM modes, String modeling, and a Twist mode based on the Mutable Instruments Plaits macro oscillator.

There are also two filter sections per scene with eight configurations and a range of algorithms, including Lowpass, Legacy Ladder Lowpass, Vintage Lowpass, Highpass, Bandpass, Notch, Allpass, Comb, and Sample & Hold, as well as additional open-source options like Jatin Chowdhury’s Cutoff Warp, Resonance Warp and Tri-Pole filters, the K35 and Diode Ladder filters from Odin 2 and the 12 and 24 dB/oct multimode filters from OB-Xd.

Surge XT also has extensive modulation capabilities, with 12 LFOs per scene, including six LFOs per voice and six global LFOs that work on a scene-wide level. On each LFO, you have 6-stage envelopes (DAHDSR) and different modes including seven morphable LFO shapes, a step-sequencer mode, a multi-segment envelope generator (MSEG) mode, Lua scripting-based customizable formula modulator.

With nearly 3000 presets and over 700 wavetables, Surge XT offers a wide sonic palette, and although perhaps too technical for beginners, it offers pro features such as full MPE support, Scala support for microtuning, and Open Sound Control (OSC) support. The active Surge XT community adds plenty of value, making investing in the journey of this open-source synth even more worthwhile.

Download Surge XT at surge-synthesizer.github.io

Best Modular: DISTRHO Cardinal

Cardinal is an open-source plugin that provides an environment for virtual Eurorack modules. Although it’s based on the same engine as the popular VCV Rack plugin, it doesn’t allow you to browse an online library to download new modules. Instead, Cardinal has over 1,300 modules that you can use to design your own virtual synth rigs and patches.

Besides running as a standalone application, Cardinal can be used as a virtual instrument or effects plugin in AU, CLAP, LV2, VST2, and VST3 formats for Windows, macOS, Linux, and even Raspberry Pi. Within Cardinal’s library of virtual modules, you’’l find versions of popular hardware modules from Mutable Instruments and Befaco, as well as some derived from the Surge XT engine.

One of the advantages of using Cardinal is that the audio engine is single-threaded and locks to the audio thread of your DAW host to eliminate latency and jitter. This increases the all-round stability and accuracy of the instrument, especially when running multiple instances alongside other synth plugins in your DAW.

The main VST3/LV2/CLAP version of Cardinal provides 8 channels of audio I/O and 10 channels of CV I/O that register as “audio” pins within the routing matrix of your DAW. This means you can send CV signals from Cardinal’s Host CV Module to other modular software environments like Bitwig Studio’s Grid or even hardware via the DC-coupled outputs of your audio interface.

Cardinal’s Host Parameters Module also allows you to automate up to 24 parameters from your DAW, and this automation data can be converted into CV signals for precise parameter control. Despite Cardinal’s advantages, many users still prefer VCV Rack for its extensive online library of modules. However, the free version of VCV Rack doesn’t include plugin compatibility, so you’ll have to record into your DAW via loopback.

Download Cardinal at cardinal.kx.studio

Best For Beginners: u-he Tyrell N6 Beta

If you’re new to the idea of using synth plugins to generate sounds and want something that’s perhaps a little tastier than your stock DAW synths, Tyrell N6 Beta is a worthwhile option. Originally, the concept for this JUNO-60-inspired synth came from a collaboration between Urs Heckmann and Amazona.de, who ultimately opted for a software plugin rather than a hardware design.

The Tyrell N6 uses a basic analogue subtractive architecture with two oscillators with variable waveshape and modulation, and a sound source mixer that allows you to balance between the two main oscillators, the sub oscillator, the noise oscillator, the ring modulation, and feedback. Also, the sound engine and filter section are derived from Diva, with two LFOs, two envelopes, and a simple mod matrix.

With three different JUNO-style chorus modes and the rather convincing analogue drift feature, you can create some really authentic analogue synth leads, pads, and basslines. Overall, Tyrell N6 is a balanced instrument with a well-designed interface that lets you create sounds from scratch or access a range of free preset libraries online.

Download Tyrell N6 at u-he.com.

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