AudioKit Synth One Synthesizer

I love music toys and have purchased dozens of synths for iPhone iPad and computer. So I checked this out just for fun. Well the SHOCK hasn’t worn off yet. This thing is utterly delicious. I find myself coming back to it as often as I have time. From the first note, I felt like I entered the world of major label recordings. That’s no small feat I’ve made records for 45 years and played some good synths in that time, both hardware and virtual. But very few have made me feel like I’m playing on a record, straight out of the box. I’ve long admired major keyboard players who could get “that sound” because I don’t play keys and didn’t quite understand how they did it. This FREE app took me there so fast that I ended up buying Audiokit’s D1 just to see the difference and support the developers. Well the D1 is much like this, except bigger and better. For 14 bucks I’m still scratching my head over that miracle. If I had to say ANYthing, the Synth One GUI is better and more pleasing to the eye. I hope that the things that they have come up with since the D1 was developed will find their way back into a future “D2”. I love this open source project and can’t wait to see what it evolves into. Having a free (great) app and an inexpensive paid (slightly better) app seems like a hip marketing strategy. It worked for me, that’s for sure. I don’t say any of this lightly, I have several great synths that I love but these are the only synths besides some top-shelf U-He items that I can actually USE as my main “record quality” synths. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude and musical joy.

This thing is almost there... So good and so fun! The one missing "feature of a feature" that I feel is quite common, even on stomp-box delays and in various music apps is a setting for a dotted eighth note delay time (an 8th plus a 16th note). This would allow much easier creation of rhythmic effects on a 16th-note pulse that are the backbone of tracks from Pink Floyd (ABITW Pt. 1 and lots more, on The Wall and after) to Kraftwerk & The Orb all the way up to Deadmau5, LCD Soundsystem and lots of modern trap, house, hip-hop, jungle, w. coast bass, techno, and other genres. Right now the app has all the triplets, which is cool, but not the same thing as the dotted effect. Synth One could consider adding it for 16th and/or 1/4 note intervals but they're less important. Your users will get a lot of mileage with just dotted-Eighth making a 16th-note rhythm unless they are tempo extremists. =) One can come close, setting delay time without using Tempo Sync, but the control is honestly jumpy and hard to finesse, and if you change the synth global tempo, it's wrong again. I humbly offer the last otherwise well-deserved star on this review in return. (It's open source; I suppose I should just learn how it all works and add it myself LOL.)

This app is exactly what it says, and then some. It offers a pretty nice set of effects on top of the oscillators and sequencer. It’s also very user friendly. It took me all of 20 minutes to figure out how everything worked, and I am a complete novice at producing. If you are looking for a portable synth to make some sounds on the go, you just found the best one. I searched through the App Store and tried others; Synth One offers so many more options, including saving your work to presets and exporting! Suggestion to the developers: just a thought for future expansion of the app, can we get additional base waveforms to work with? Triangle, sawtooth, square, and a low duty cycle square are nice, but the addition of sine waves and other, more complex wave forms would offer some nice new possibilities. Also, being able to add extra filters (that is, have 2, 3, or more filters at once) would be a very nice feature for the future. Lastly, having more than 2 oscillators would be great. There’s a lot you can do with 2, but three brings in a whole new dimension to things.