Synthesist and microtonal composer John Moriarty share this intro to Surge, an open source synthesizer that he describes as the ‘Gold Standard’ for microtuning support.
A Youtube commenter notes that the video “Felt like an early 90’s job training vid, but more entertaining.” Moriarty attributes that to the ‘the terrible green screen key and crap lighting’.
Get beyond the terrible green screen key and crap lighting, though, and the video quickly transitions from being an upbeat retro intro to Surge to digging into Scala files, alternate tunings and non-monotonic controller mapping.
Surge is available as a free download for Linux, macOS & Windows.
Wait… Did Tim Webb get a side gig writing for Synthtopia?
Can’t remember this type of shade, here.
Haha well I was the first person to refer to it as a “terrible green screen key and crap lighting”, so I hope you’ll cut synthhead some slack here =)
I know it’s free and opensource and does mpe
But I don’t like the interface
Somehow it doesn’t invite me to do sounds with it
I never use it
Meh
I feel it’s worth making the effort to get into it. It’s a really flexible synth, but it’s also quite light-weight in terms of CPU usage, which is fantastic.
Oh i guess that’s why i made over 300 tracks with surge then. because it was “meh”..
Dito.
From a GUI standpoint, Surge is far off from being any kind of ultimate.
Thanks very much for the write-up and share! =)
Thanks for making the video. I learned a ton about what microtonal support means/can mean, surge specifics aside.
This is way cool, I got this running with midiguitar 2 and playing some microtonal guitar through surge, check out tutorial, https://youtu.be/ThnZ_0dMat8