- Developer: LennarDigital
- Version: 3.0.75
- Format: VST, VST3, AU AAX
- File Size: 71 MB
- System Requirements: Windows 7+ (64-bit), macOS 10.9+ (ARM/Intel)
Sylenth1 is still a must-own for dance music producers, even after all these years, and there are five reasons why.
It’s currently 149 euros, which comes out to about 167 US dollars, and you can rent to own it for 9.95 euros a month. I think the term is 14 or 15 months, but the exact number is on their website. I know calling it a must-own is a pretty controversial statement. There’s Serum, there’s Vital, there’s Dune, plenty of other synths that are a lot more modern, and Sylenth1 hasn’t been updated in all these years. I understand that argument.
Everybody has it. All the established producers, the best ones out there, have it, and it’s one of the first synths a lot of them reach for. I’m not saying you should just use whatever everybody else uses, and most of the time that isn’t a good enough reason. In this case I think it is. It’s highly rated, too. Magazine articles from when it came out in 2006 show everybody was blown away. Nothing had come along that sounded this good, because it has four unison oscillators that are anti-aliasing, and that’s what makes it so great. I think it stands alone for that reason.
It’s also extremely backward compatible. I had a track sitting on my hard drive for eight years. I decided to focus purely on dance music around 2012, and that track is from about April or May of 2013. When I opened it back up, a ton of the plugins in the project had expired or were no longer available, so I had to go through and swap them out. Sylenth1 I didn’t have to touch. You can go back to tutorials from producers, or buy templates written for Sylenth1 or produced with it ten years ago, and it opens right up.
Then there’s ease of use. The layout is simple. You’ve got four oscillators, all unison and anti-aliasing, and each one can be set to eight voices. Combine that with polyphony of up to 16 voices and it can run over 500 voices at once if you’re playing enough notes. Building a bass sound takes very little: start from a preset, take the retrigger off, add a little release, shut the filter down with a low pass filter, and assign the envelope to it. That’s how easy it is, if you know a little about sound design, mind you. There are simpler synthesizers out there, but none of them come anywhere near the ballpark of what this one can do.
And if you don’t know a whole lot about sound design, no problem, because Sylenth1 has an amazing amount of presets. I’ve got a Major Laser pack that I picked up on sale, and Shocking Sounds, which is 22 banks of at least 60 sounds each, I’d guess. I got that on sale not long ago for something like 50 or 60 bucks, so that’s probably around 1,600 sounds right there. Add all the factory banks, some of them done by artists (bank 5 is all artists), and then there’s a great sound bank from Mayan, plus Dave Parkinson, Jerome Isma-Ae, Sunny Lax. You can find preset banks for Sylenth1 all over the place. It’s an unending amount, and an avalanche of inexpensive ones from the top dance music artists in the world, waiting to be bought (or practically stolen) at a low price when they’re on sale.
Above all, it just sounds amazing. It’s literally the sound of EDM going back 15 years. I know the sounds have evolved, there’s a lot of bass music out there now, and everybody is using Serum for that. But there are other genres besides bass music: trance, progressive house, progressive trance, deep house. For that kind of music Sylenth1 is still very credible. More than credible. I made a track with one year of experience, and the reason it sounds kind of okay is Sylenth1. The bass sounds are absolutely awesome, you can make killer pads with it, and it’s the king of supersaws. It just has it all.
There are other synths, of course. Take Dune: you’re going to pay 170 bucks for it, it’s not the easiest synth to program and learn, and once you do it sounds great and it’s fat. It makes a supersaw with, I think, over a thousand voices depending on how many notes you play. So yes, if you zero in on one thing, there are synths that will do it better than Sylenth1, but not that much better, and in some areas they fall short. Serum, for example, is not going to be your choice if you want a supersaw. Sylenth1 is.
For anyone new and looking for a synthesizer, it’s an absolute must. The rent-to-own is 9.95 euros a month, and I guarantee you’ll probably want to keep it.