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Best synth VST under 100

Gazillion Industries ·

Two in the morning, the beat is finished except for the bass, and you are forty presets deep into the synth that came with the DAW. Every one of them is close. None of them is the note you heard on the walk home.

Under $100 the field splits cleanly. The free synths are complete instruments you can finish records on, and the best-known paid ones sit well above the line — Serum 2 is $249 on Xfer's own page, Pigments is $199 on Arturia's. What a hundred dollars buys is focus: one idea, finished, with every stage on the panel. If the point is to learn how a synth works rather than to shop presets, start with a monosynth. Ours is JOURNEYMAN, $59.

The short version

What under $100 buys
focus — fewer engines, every control visible at once
Free first
Vital's Basic tier and Surge XT cost nothing and are whole synths
Best to learn on
one voice, one signal path, no menu diving
The tell
after an hour you can say what every knob did
The step up
$199 to $249 territory, and you do not need it yet
Our answer
JOURNEYMAN, $59, one voice and three oscillators

What "under 100" actually buys

Do the arithmetic before you shop, because the bracket is doing more work than people think. Serum 2 is $249. Pigments is $199. Diva is 179 € with a demo you can download first. Against $59 that is four and a fifth times, nearly three and a half times, and a number that changes with the exchange rate. Nobody sells you a bad synth at those prices. They sell you a bigger one.

Bigger costs something other than money. Six synthesis engines and seventeen hundred presets are a catalog to work through, and a catalog is the opposite of a panel you know by heart. The under-$100 shelf exists because a small maker cannot fund six engines, so they build one instrument properly and put the controls where your hands are. That constraint is the whole reason the bracket is worth searching.

There is a budget argument too, duller and truer than the sound-quality one. A $59 synth leaves $41 of a hundred for the rest of the chain, and our compressor, DRUGS, is free, so that part costs nothing at all. The wider free shelf is in best free VST plugins.

Why the best cheap synth VST is usually a small one

A synth teaches you at the rate its panel allows. Turn one control, hear one thing change, and the connection sticks. Open a modulation matrix with unlimited connections, assign a source to a destination through two dropdowns, and what sticks is the software's filing system. Both synths make sound. Only one of them is making you better at this.

You can hear which kind you are holding in about a minute. Close the filter by hand on a sustained note. If the tone darkens smoothly and you can say where it stopped, the panel is telling you the truth. If it steps, zips, or changes character in a way you cannot attribute to the knob you touched, something upstream is moving that the panel never showed you. Cutoff and resonance are the two controls worth knowing cold, and they get their own page: filter cutoff and resonance.

The practice worth avoiding is scrolling. Preset banks sold as inspiration turn sound design into shopping, and four hundred patches later you have learned one thing: none of them were it. Presets are for starting. The panel is for finishing.

A monosynth, in the order the signal travels

Every subtractive synth is the same four stages in the same order. Oscillators make a raw tone with too much in it. A mixer sets how much of each one you hear. A filter takes material away. An amplifier decides the shape of the note in time. Envelopes and an LFO move those stages while the note is sounding. Learn that chain once and every synth you ever open is a variation on it.

JOURNEYMAN lays the chain out left to right, which is why it works as the example here. Three oscillators, each with its own OCTAVE and WAVE. Octave is the register: an octave is a doubling of frequency, so the A above middle C at 440 Hz becomes 220, then 110, then 55 Hz three clicks down, which is where bass lives. WAVE is a continuous sweep from triangle through saw and square to pulse, so the harmonic content moves as one gesture rather than as four buttons.

Two switches change what the oscillators do to each other. 1-2 SYNC has oscillator one restart oscillator two, which forces the second wave to repeat at the first one's pitch while keeping its own shape — move the synced oscillator and you get the tearing sweep that a sync lead is made of. 3-1 FM points oscillator three at oscillator one's frequency. At slow rates that is vibrato. At audio rates it adds sidebands and gets to bells, clangs and metal faster than any other control on the instrument.

The MIXER sits after them, with a level for OSC 1, 2 and 3 plus NOISE and EXT IN. Noise is what you add for breath on a pad or the chiff on a flute-ish lead. External in is the door: send a drum loop through the synth's own filter and envelopes and the instrument becomes a processor. Bright waves played high on the keyboard are where any digital oscillator gets tested, which is the subject of what aliasing is.

Two ladder filters, and what SPACING does

The filter is where a synth patch becomes a sound. JOURNEYMAN has two of them, one left and one right, sharing a CUTOFF and offset from each other by SPACING. Pull the two apart and the left and right channels stop filtering the same material, which reads to the ear as width. Push SPACING to zero and the pair line up and the patch goes solid in the middle.

RESONANCE lifts a narrow band right at the cutoff, and past a certain point that lift is loud enough to be the loudest thing in the patch. KB AMT ties the cutoff to the keyboard so a note two octaves up arrives as bright as the one you set the patch on, instead of getting duller the higher you play. The mode switch gives you DUAL LP, two low passes working together, or HP:LP, a high pass and a low pass, which leaves a band with the air above it and the weight below it taken out. There is a 3 or 4 pole selector as well; in the textbook each pole is another 6 dB per octave of slope, so the choice is about how much of the material above the cutoff survives.

Width has a bill attached and it arrives in mono. Two filters offset in the two channels sounds enormous on headphones and can flatten out on a phone speaker or a club sum, so check it before you commit: there is a full page on mono compatibility, and the mechanism behind the collapse is phase cancellation. If filter moves are the part you want to get good at, the technique piece is how to make a filter sweep, and the wider category is in best filter plugins.

JOURNEYMAN is our monosynth for Mac and Windows: one voice, three oscillators, two ladder filters, two envelopes, two modulation busses and 200 programs. Every control that matters is on the front panel, which is the point of it. There's a demo on the page.

Envelopes, the LFO and the two modulation busses

Two ADSR envelopes, and they do different jobs. The VOLUME ENV shapes the note: attack near 1 ms gives you a pluck with the click still on the front of it, attack around 40 ms turns the same patch into something that swells. The FILTER ENV shapes the brightness, and that is the one that makes a bass sound played rather than typed — a fast attack, a short decay and a low sustain is the whole recipe for a note that opens and shuts. What you are sculpting there is the front edge, covered in what is a transient.

The LFO has RATE and SYNC, plus sample and hold among its shapes, which is the stepped random source behind every burbling sequence ever bounced. Sync ties the rate to the host so the wobble lands on the grid. Left free it drifts, and drift is usually the more musical of the two.

Then the part most cheap synths leave out. Two modulation busses, one on the MOD WHEEL and one on a PEDAL/ON input, each with four choices: SOURCE, SHAPING, DESTINATION and AMOUNT. That is a performance control you set once and then play, rather than automation you draw afterwards. The TOUCH SURFACE is the same idea with two dimensions: X moves the cutoff, Y moves the spacing, so one drag opens the filter and widens the pair in a single gesture. GLIDE, keyboard TRIGGER modes and a BEND range finish the playing side.

Why one voice is the best VST synth to learn on

One voice means every note you play goes down the same path, so cause and effect stay legible. On a sixteen-voice synth, a filter envelope you set too slow gets masked by the note before it still ringing. On a monosynth there is nothing to hide behind. You hear your own settings, which is uncomfortable for about a week and then becomes the reason you improve.

It also changes how you play. Trigger mode decides what happens when you hold one key and press another: retrigger starts the envelopes again, single trigger lets the new note take over the one already sounding. Put GLIDE on top of single trigger and you get the slide that no amount of pitch automation ever quite sounds like, because your fingers are setting the timing.

Here is the cost, stated flat: you cannot play a chord. A monosynth gives you one note at a time, so pads, stacks and held triads are somebody else's job. Two things make that survivable. Basses, leads, hooks and percussion are most of what a producer actually needs from a synth, and where you do want thickness you record the part twice with different settings, which gives you a chord you voiced deliberately. The general method is in how to make a synth sound thicker.

What makes a good synth VST for beginners

Five things, and price is not one of them.

A knob for every stage. If a control exists, it should be visible without a tab. Hidden pages are fine on an instrument you already know and fatal on one you are learning.

Presets filed by job. Basses, leads, keys, pads, percussion, fx. A bank sorted by job is a teaching aid, because you can open two basses and compare the panels. A bank sorted by the sound designer's mood is a shopping catalog.

A standalone version. Learning a synth inside a DAW means learning two things at once. JOURNEYMAN runs standalone on macOS alongside AU and VST3; on Windows it is VST3 inside your host.

Readable values. A control marked 0 to 100 tells you nothing you can carry. Hz, ms, semitones and octaves are information, and information is what transfers to the next synth you open.

It runs on the machine you own. JOURNEYMAN is a universal binary, macOS 10.13 or later, Windows 10 or later, 64-bit. Check that line on any product page before the price line.

Other synths people name in this search

Everything below was read off the maker's own page while writing this. Where no price appears, the page would not give one up, and a wrong number is worse than no number. Every one of them is built as a polyphonic instrument, which is the honest reason they read as alternatives rather than as the same thing cheaper.

Vital. The Basic tier is free and Matt Tytel's page describes it as the full synth with all features, with 75 presets and 25 wavetables included; paid tiers add preset and wavetable counts, and the prices on that page load from a script that did not run for us. It is a wavetable synth built around spectral warping, with animated controls, drag-and-drop modulation and stereo modulation splitting. Windows 10 and up, macOS 10.15 and up on Intel or Apple Silicon, Ubuntu 18.04 and up, 64-bit, OpenGL 3 or higher. If you want a polyphonic wavetable synth and you want it for nothing, this is the one everyone names, and they are right to.

Surge XT. Free and open source, maintained by a community rather than a company. Their page lists a subtractive hybrid engine, two scenes per patch, three oscillators per scene across twelve algorithms, two filter units in eight configurations, over 2,800 patches and over 700 wavetables, plus MPE, microtuning and Open Sound Control. Enormous, and the size is the trade: more instrument here than a first week can hold.

u-he Podolski. Free, and the closest thing on the free shelf to a small synth you can learn on. One oscillator, one multimode filter with drive, one envelope, two LFOs and a combined arpeggiator and 16-step sequencer; polyphonic to 16 voices with mono and legato modes; over 300 factory presets; panel resizable from 70% to 200%. Shipping since 2005.

u-he Zebralette. Also free: a single oscillator from their larger Zebra engine, with a 16-slot waveset, 24 spectral effects, a 32-stage envelope generator and 300 presets. u-he are open on the page about it being an introduction to the bigger synth.

Dexed. Free software under GPL v3, a six-operator FM synth their page describes as closely modeled on a Yamaha hardware unit, with 144 automatable parameters on one panel and three selectable engine types. FM is a separate discipline from subtractive synthesis, so treat this as a second instrument rather than a first one.

Xfer Serum 2. $249 on Xfer's own page, with lifetime free updates and a free upgrade for Serum 1 owners. Wavetable, multisample, sample, granular and spectral oscillators. It is the synth this search is usually measuring itself against, and at more than four times a $59 budget it answers a different question than "under 100" is asking.

Arturia Pigments. $199 on Arturia's page. Six synthesis engines including modal, granular, wavetable, sample, harmonic and virtual analog, sixteen filter types with over fifty modes, and more than 1,700 presets. A genuinely deep sound-design instrument, and a very large room to be dropped into on day one.

u-he Diva. 179 €, with a macOS demo on the page and over 1,200 factory presets, built around mixing and matching oscillator, filter and envelope panels. Widely loved, above this bracket, and the demo is the right way to find out whether you want it.

The synth already in your DAW. Free, installed, and the reason plenty of producers never learn synthesis: it is the one you scroll. Worth an hour of deliberate panel time before you spend anything, if only so you know what you are missing when you do.

Ten minutes with any synth before you buy it

Do this with the demo, in this order. It works the same on a free synth as on a $249 one.

  1. Load the synth on an empty track and hold one note for four bars.
  2. Open the filter cutoff fully, then close it by hand across the full range. Listen for stepping or zipper noise.
  3. Set resonance to maximum and sweep the cutoff from 20 Hz to 20 kHz.
  4. Set the volume envelope to 1 ms attack and 2 s release, then play one short note.
  5. Play the top two octaves of the keyboard on the brightest wave and listen for tones that move against the pitch.
  6. Mute every oscillator but one and name the wave by ear.
  7. Open ten presets and count how many you can take apart from the front panel alone.
  8. Bounce eight bars and play the file on your phone.
  9. Open five instances on five tracks and watch the CPU meter.

Step seven is the one that decides it. A synth you can reverse-engineer from its own presets will teach you for years. A synth whose presets are unreadable from the panel is a sample library with knobs on the front.

What it costs you

A monosynth costs you polyphony, and that is most of the bill. One note at a time means pads and held chords come from somewhere else, and there is no setting that changes it. Decide whether your next six months of tracks need chords from a synth or bass and leads from one. For a lot of people making beats, the honest answer is the second.

It also costs you the easy option. The 200 programs get you into the right area and the panel does the rest, which is the trade you are making on purpose and the reason the skill transfers to every other synth you touch.

And synth bass eats level. A patch with the filter wide open, resonance up and three oscillators in the mixer will read far hotter than the same part played on a sample, and it will push a master into trouble long before it sounds loud. Set the mixer with your eyes on the meter, not the knob — gain staging and headroom both apply. Low notes that feel huge in the room can also disappear on a phone, which is its own problem with its own page: bass on phone speakers.

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Questions people ask

What is the best synth VST under 100?

It depends on what you want it to teach you. For a polyphonic wavetable synth at zero cost, Vital's free Basic tier is the one most people land on. For a single instrument you can learn completely and then play, a monosynth is the better shape, and JOURNEYMAN is ours at $59 with one voice, three oscillators, two ladder filters and 200 programs. Both answers are under a hundred dollars. Only one of them puts every control in front of you at once.

What is the best cheap synth VST?

Cheap and free overlap heavily in synths, more than in any other plug-in category. Surge XT is free and open source and outspecs plenty of paid instruments. u-he Podolski is free and small enough to know by heart. Once you are paying, the question changes from "what do I get" to "what am I going to learn", and the answer is the synth whose panel you can read without the manual.

What is the best synth VST for beginners?

One with a knob for every stage, presets filed by job, readable values in Hz and ms, and ideally a standalone version so you are learning one piece of software instead of two. JOURNEYMAN meets all four, runs standalone on macOS, and files its 200 programs as basses, leads, keys, pads, percussion and fx so you can open two of the same kind and compare the panels.

What is the best VST synth to learn on?

A monosynth, almost every time. One voice means you hear your own settings with nothing overlapping them, and the four-stage chain you learn on it — oscillators, mixer, filter, amplifier, with envelopes and an LFO moving them — is the same chain inside every large synth you will open later. Learning it on a big instrument works too. It just takes longer, because the panel keeps offering you somewhere else to be.

Is a free synth VST good enough?

Yes, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Vital's Basic tier is described on its own page as the full synth with all features, and Surge XT ships over 2,800 patches for nothing. The reason to pay is a specific instrument you want, rather than a general upgrade in quality.

Is a good synth VST worth paying for when free ones exist?

It is worth paying for a shape the free shelf does not cover. That shelf is polyphonic almost end to end. A one-voice instrument with two filters, two modulation busses and a touch surface is a different tool for a different job, and $59 is the cost of not spending three months looking for a free one.

Mono or poly for a first synth?

Mono to learn, poly to arrange. Get the chain into your hands on one voice where every change is audible, then add a polyphonic synth when you need chords. Doing it the other way round is why so many producers have used a big synth for two years and still browse presets.

Do I need a MIDI keyboard to use a synth VST?

No, but a monosynth rewards one more than most plug-ins do, because glide, trigger behavior, bend and the mod wheel are all played rather than drawn. Twenty-five keys with a wheel is enough. Without one you can still program everything from the panel and draw the notes.

What JOURNEYMAN does

$59, one voice, and a panel with nothing hidden behind a tab. JOURNEYMAN runs on Mac and Windows — AU, VST3 and standalone on macOS, VST3 on Windows, universal binary, macOS 10.13 or later, Windows 10 or later, 64-bit. Here is the whole instrument in the order you meet it. Three oscillators, each with OCTAVE and a continuous WAVE sweep from triangle through saw and square to pulse, plus 1-2 SYNC and 3-1 FM between them. A MIXER over OSC 1, 2 and 3 with NOISE and EXT IN, so the whole instrument works on audio you send it.

Two ladder filters, left and right, with a shared CUTOFF, SPACING between them, RESONANCE and KB AMT, switchable DUAL LP or HP:LP and selectable 3 or 4 pole. A FILTER ENV and a VOLUME ENV, both ADSR. An LFO with RATE, SYNC and sample and hold. Two modulation busses on the mod wheel and a pedal input, each with SOURCE, SHAPING, DESTINATION and AMOUNT. GLIDE, note priority, single or multi TRIGGER, and a BEND range.

A TOUCH SURFACE maps X to cutoff and Y to spacing. And 200 programs — basses, leads, keys, pads, percussion and fx — every one of them wired to the mod wheel and the touch surface, so the first thing you do with a program is play it rather than edit it.

It will be two in the morning again soon enough. The difference is that this time you will reach for the octave switch and the filter envelope, because you know what they do, and the note you heard on the walk home will take about ninety seconds.

JOURNEYMAN — a monosynth for Mac and Windows. One voice, three oscillators, two ladder filters, two envelopes, two modulation busses and 200 programs.

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