CAC – The War Kitty Chronicles

I’ll keep this short and sweet…

Sylenth 1 is a polyphonic subtractive software synthesizer from LennarDigital. It is ‘warm’, phat, easy to tweak, straight forward in design, has unlimited modulation options… and, it’s not a CPU Pig! What’s not to like.

I mentioned to a friend that I wish I could find an analog soft synth that I could really use for a variety of production stuff and the suggestion was Sylenth 1. I downloaded the demo and had at it. 3 days later the full version was mine.

This is a friendly synth: 4 oscillators with a variety of waveforms to mix and match, a standard filter section (with ‘drive’ control), 2 mod envelopes, 2 LFOs, and 2 routing banks. There are no superfluous knobs to get in your way. Everything here is functional and obvious. It has a copy/paste osc and env feature that I really like. And, all the modulation and routing can be handled from drop down assign menus each with its own control knob.

The warmth of this synth is amazing and the filters are very responsive and full of dynamic range. They nailed it:

“Two of the main aspects of any subtractive virtual analog synth,” states Lennar, “which determines its sonic character are its oscillators and filters. I’ve always liked the screeching sound of resonating analog filters like those from the TB-303 or the Minimoog for example, but I’ve never been able to find a VST synth with filters that could produce sounds like that really well. A lot of them simply end up in a pure sine wave when brought into self-oscillation, while others don’t even get to that point. As for the oscillators in other VST synths, I found that some of them sounded dull at low frequencies while others produced audible digital aliasing at high frequencies. So my starting point was to overcome these problems by designing my own filters and oscillators from the ground up.”

The center screen allows access to the menus and effects. The effects are fantastic; very top drawer and include distortion, phaser, delay, chorus, EQ, reverb, compression, and an arpeggiator. The arp is incredibly cool. You can not only program the normal stuff but also hold and velocity… and it can me used as a modulation source allowing you to create some wild gating events.

There are some drawbacks: you cannot route the filters in series and there is no pulse width modulation that I could find.

The Sylenth 1 comes with a ton of presets, 700 or 1300. Whatever, more than you need and no I haven’t gone through them all. It is just so much fun to make your own sounds and this synth makes that easy… even for a novice (like me).

Yeah, I recommend the Sylenth 1… it is the bomb…

LennarDigital

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