Oscillators
At its core Sylenth1 houses 4 alias-free unison oscillators, which generate analog shaped waveforms. Each oscillator is capable of producing 8 unison voices in full stereo, adding up to a total of 32 voices per note. With its 16 notes of polyphony this means you can play up to 512 voices simultaneously! The oscillators perform extremely well in both the very low (down to 0.01Hz and below!) and very high (all the way up to half the samplerate) frequency regions without losing their sharpness, liveliness or character. This makes them well suited for all kinds of sounds, from the deepest basses imaginable to the highest crystal clear bells.
Filters
On top of that there are 2 state of the art, pure analog sounding filter sections. Each of these consists of 4 filter stages with nonlinear saturation incorporated, in order to emulate the warmth and drive of a real analog filter. The resonance control can be turned up to a level way beyond self-oscillation and combined with the drive control this makes it possible to let the filters SCREAM! Where a lot of digital filters sound like they’re made out of cheap plastic, these filters sound rock-solid, warm and raw.
Modulation
Sylenth offers many modulation options to sculpture the sound any way you like. There are 2 ADSR envelopes and 2 LFO’s which can be used to modulate a whole set of different parameters. Next to that, it is possible to use the extra 2 amplitude envelopes, velocity, keyboard track or modulation wheel as a source for modulation.
Master FX
The final part of this synth is the master effects section. A set of 7 professional quality sound effects and an arpeggiator, conveniently grouped into an LCD panel structure.
- Arpeggiator – 10 different melodic modes, built-in step sequencer with adjustable pitch, velocity and hold settings. Outputs Step Velocity as a modulation source.
- Distortion – Five different types of distortion (overdrive, foldback, clip, decimator and bitcrusher) in full stereo, uses 4x oversampling to minimize aliasing artifacts.
- Phaser – 6-Stage stereo phaser, with 2x oversampling, an embedded LFO, feedback and frequency spread adjustment.
- Chorus/Flanger – 4-Stage stereo chorus, with 2x oversampling, adjustable delay time, depth, rate and feedback for flanging effects.
- Equalizer – Bass and treble adjustment by frequency and amplification.
- Delay – Delay module with low and high pass filters, unique echo smearing function, pingpong mode with stereo spreading, independent left and right delay time and adjustable stereo width.
- Reverb – Smooth reverb with adjustable pre-delay, damp, size and stereo width.
- Compressor – Stereo compressor with attack, release, threshold and ratio settings, which can be used to increase punch, drive, warmth and analog feel of your sounds.
Performance
With all the functionality and processing horsepower mentioned above, you might expect that this synth would max out even the fastest CPU in no-time, especially considering the high sound quality of each single voice and effect. Well, one of the many benefits of this synth is that it doesn’t. It uses highly optimized code and SSE instructions in order to reduce the CPU usage to a minimum. It will also automatically turn off any parts that are not used, to save extra CPU time. This enables you to create pure quality sound using only minimal system resources.
