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)…

Thanx für the heads-up!

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Are talking about XT?

Yes, -XT , it’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 doesn’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 them… :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; it’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. I’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 I’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 cases…

Cheers,

Torsten

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OK, one more to try out then…

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/l’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. Friggin’ amazing considering another famous free synth that doesn’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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Here’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

Lot’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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