I’m out of the loop on soft synths — when I’m not using hardware I’ll usually settle for Operator or Wavetable stock synths included with Ableton, and they’re usually enough for what I need to do. I’m even more out of the loop on free soft synths, so when I went looking I was surprised that so many people online were stanning a free VST synth called Vital.
Serum was one I used in the past, but it’s a big dollar buy. Pigments from Arturia is also highly recommended. But first try Vital, I was told, and see what you think. After all, you can’t beat the price of free.
Vital has been out for several years now. Four years ago it became open source, with the source code to the synth posted free on Github. It has paid tiers, though and I doubted I’d be able to do much before I hit an artificial restriction requiring a paid update.
I never did. We’ve built our scene on free labor and free products and sampling on the sly, but rarely do you see a free instrument or device on this scale. It’s not just a VST that you plug in and does one thing. It’s a VST that you plug in and it does everything. Or just about.
I set aside a studio day to play around with Vital and picked it up pretty fast. If you’ve used soft synths before you’ll find a very flat learning curve. If you haven’t then the concepts you learn here will be useful even if you move on to something else. The expectation we have for free software is that it’s complicated to use — generic enough to be okay at a lot of things you might want to do but really bad at anything specific you really need. Vital is the opposite of this. It’s a very “open” world — you can watch a tutorial and learn something specific, but you can also wander and experiment. The “use case” for Vital might not be infinite but it feels that way.
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It’s also fun to use. Vital is very visual, and it works for visual learners, everything is displayed in buttons, knobs, dials and shapes of varying colors. Ask a newbie to use LFOs to modulate pitch, they might not really understand what any of those words mean, but you can show them easily and with visual guidance it just sticks, even if they won’t know at first exactly what they’re doing.
I was also drawn to the sleekness of the UI and UX that is probably better than most of the paid VSTs I have. Then there’s “Text-To-Wavetable” which manipulates typed words. It will make novices’ faces light up when they use it to make their own spectral Daft Punk’ish vocoderish tracks. There are a lot of creative waystations like this — maybe you’ll use them, maybe you won’t, but it’s just cool and fun and maybe inspiring.
The “basic” version of Vital is free and while I didn’t need to upgrade, I was so impressed with this robust synthesizer that I wanted to pay anyway, not for any of the additional features offered but just to support this amazing thing. The “plus” version costs just $25 and “pro” is $80. Vital also supports not just Mac and Windows but also Linux.
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