Nikkosynth 0.2.59 · Windows · macOS · Linux
Ten oscillators of six kinds, two filters in series, fifteen envelopes, five LFOs, a 32-slot matrix, an eight-track sequencer and twelve effects — in one window, with two thousand patches ready to play.
No account, no time limit. $89 for a personal licence when you are ready.
What it is
Five synthesis methods sharing one modulation system — so a pad, a bass, a DX7 piano and a physical string are all the same ten oscillators, in the same window, with the same filters and effects behind them.
Three analogue (band-limited, or any of 451 wavetables), three Super stacks, a Karplus-Strong physical model, a six-operator DX7 engine and two noise oscillators in eight colours. A pad, a bass, a piano and a string can all be one patch.
Eighteen digital models — SEM morph, MS20, ladders, a Vowel filter — then four analogue circuits modelled by topology: MINI, SEM, ACID and ARP. Each switches independently.
Five global envelopes plus one inside every oscillator. Per-segment curves, quantise, loops, Legato, Reset, Freerun — and Invert, so a sweep can dip instead of rise.
Up to 64 steps per track with their own lengths, seven lanes per step (note, velocity, gate, chance, ratchet, nudge, mod), its own clock — and a library of 500 sequences in twenty genres.
Every envelope, LFO, wheel, MPE axis, any CC and the sequencer's Mod lane, routed per sample to pitch, pulse width, Super detune, ring depth, filters and more. The wheels and aftertouch are pre-wired.
Chorus, flanger, phaser, distortion, Lo-Fi, rotary, tremolo, vibrato, wah, a multitap echo, five reverbs with a real shimmer, and a five-band EQ with a curve you can drag.
Hand-authored seeds, the Complex, Noisy and Super families, a game-audio SoundFX kit and 200 Pure Analog patches made the way a Minimoog made them. Click a patch and it plays, with a Details panel of what it uses and how complex it is. Your own banks leave as encrypted .nik soundbanks, with a cover, an author and terms the buyer approves.
True legato mono with portamento, sixteen voices, MPE, and seven tunings from Just to Werckmeister and Rast, or your own twelve notes in cents.
Drag plates into columns, fold them, reset in one click. 89 skins, eleven languages, full-interface zoom, and Mutate (F8) for a fresh take on any patch.
Under the hood
The parts that are hard to fake are the parts that were measured rather than approximated.
Every oscillator plays from a pyramid of single-cycle tables, one per half-octave, holding only the harmonics that fit under Nyquist at that pitch. At A7 the 13th-harmonic alias of a naive ramp measures 7.7 % of the fundamental; here it is 0.029 %.
Seven copies, detuned along the curve measured from the original instrument by Adam Szabo (KTH, 2010): uneven pairs at ±0.110, ±0.0629 and ±0.0195 of the fundamental, a detune knob that stays gentle to halfway then opens steeply, and a pitch-tracked high-pass at the note's own fundamental. Then generalised: the copies play any waveform — super-sine, super-square, super-wavetable.
MINI is a Huovilainen Moog ladder with a tanh inside every stage; SEM is a state-variable filter with a cubic soft-clip in its feedback; 303 is a high-pass into a sharp resonant core; ARP is two cascaded 2-pole sections. A test compares every pair and fails if any two render the same thing.
The panel
The whole instrument is on one face. Below it, each plate on its own, captured from the application at 200 % so every label is readable.
Try it
Free to download and free to try, with no time limit and no account. The personal licence is $89.
macOS build is on the way. The engine is portable; only the packaging is missing.
Linux build is on the way — the standalone and the plug-in share the same engine.
Licensing
Shareware done properly: the instrument works completely before you pay, and the licence is a single payment with no subscription.
One person, any number of their own computers. No subscription, no renewal.
One seat for each person who uses it, with the per-seat price falling as the count rises.
Try it for as long as you like. A licence removes the reminder.
Download Nikkosynth