Surge XT Synth - New Juce version of popular free synth

Hi All,

Just a heads up on the new version. :smiley:

Cheers,

Dave

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Very nice - and migration was relatively painless (presets are upwards-compatible)ā€¦

Thanx fĆ¼r the heads-up!

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Are talking about XT?

Yes, -XT , itā€™s on V 1.0 with the new Juce design.

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Nice! I see there is additional content, which is wavetables and one soundset.

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I know it is free, but is it worth checking out for somebody who probably already has way too many soft synths? :slight_smile:

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Do you know anyone here who doesnā€™t have lots of synths? :wink:

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My name is Doug and I am a soft synth downloader. I got more and more behind on actually using themā€¦ :grinning:

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I would definitely say yes! Surge is a great ā€œuniversal virtual analogā€ - not a reproduction of any specific synth, but rather a ā€œbest ofā€ of all relevant synthesis features. Basic analog-style oscillators + Wavetables, with various ways of distorting the original waveform to come up with new and original sound sources. Also a bit of FM, and some alternative oscillator models (e.g. string, window).

Filters are the usual stuff, plus some interesting variants, with different routing options.

Its modulation capabilities are outstanding - tons of ways to bring your sounds to life with LFOs, envelopes or controllers. Not to mention the great effects engine (4 inserts, 4 sends, 4 master effects) and a nice collection of effect plugins (some cool Airwindows algorithms built in).

The layout is straightforward and logical without any unnecessary bells & whistles; itā€™s pretty easy to knock together the typical ā€œanalogā€ patches in very little time.

Surge is definitely one of the highlights in my soft synth collection - definitely the ā€œif I had to choose one VST synth for a lonely islandā€ category. Iā€™m in the process of moving most of my bread&butter ā€œanalogā€ patches over to Surge to clean out my Cantabile setup; so far Iā€™ve managed to copy most of them pretty convincingly. Maybe not exactly the same sound as on the previous synth, but close enough in all casesā€¦

Cheers,

Torsten

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OK, one more to try out thenā€¦

I downloaded too. Very interesting sounds, and a lot of them.

  • Paul

Thanks for posting this!

There are also several decent skin options if you find the stocker a bit hard on the eyes:

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Yup - Modern Dark for me!

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ditto

Dang. Just did a first eval of Surge and this thing is seriously CPU friendly and sounds really good. I d/lā€™d it months ago but never messed with it till now.

Just put together a test project to mess with some of the presets and see how well they fit together. 14 instances of Surge, 5 instances BBCSO, and 23 various FX (eq, gain blocks, Ozone, etc) and it runs between 7% and 14% cpu with everything in play at the same time. This is on an ancient Xeon W3680 repurposed server. Frigginā€™ amazing considering another famous free synth that doesnā€™t seem to do any more or have that different of sounds brings it to its knees with 3 instances.

For the non-synth people like me, the bazillion presets it comes with are really nice and well organized. Pleasantly surprised how well they work together in a mix. Most need a minor EQ similar to what a good sound guy would do in a live situation, but other than that they really work well in a mix.

I can see how Surge would be a staple for someone who plays synth live. Ancient laptop zero problems with this and it sounds fab.

Thanks again dave_dore for the heads up about the new version!

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Hereā€™s a short clip from the sequence I did to evaluate Surge XT (lol, my first ever attempt to do a synth only sequence that required some BBCSO to reduce the cheese factor at least a little bit) All sounds but the horns and tam tam are Surge XT presets (14 instances). Maybe it helps someone decide whether they want to investigate Surge for themselves:

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Surge XT 1.1.0 (2022-08-03 20:02:01 UTC ) : UPDATE

Lotā€™s of new stuff, a great synth!

Dave

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Surge XT 1.1.2 (2022-11-01 15:08:58 UTC ) :UPDATE

Dave

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Surge XT Latest Release: XT 1.2.2 - 2023-05-01 : UPDATE

Dave

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Now updated to 1.2.3

  • Paul
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