BLEASS Alpha

What it does

A polyphonic virtual analog synth in tabbed pages: a general page for voices, detune, modulation, velocity and the arpeggiator, then oscillators, filters with their own envelopes, modulation, and effects carrying reverb, delay, tremolo, a bit crusher and drive. The on-screen keyboard adds hold and scroll buttons, a pitch bar, selectable scales and root notes, and an MPE mode where pressure and vertical finger movement add glide and change dynamics. Over 200 presets from guest designers ship with it, and further packs sell in an in-app shop for a few dollars each, one from Patrick at The GarageBand Guide.

In the demo

Jade walks the interface left to right, then spends most of the hour playing the preset banks pack by pack, holding chords on the hold key and sliding up single keys so the touch response is audible. She filters the list by category tags, then puts an effect app behind it.

Worth knowing

It runs light enough on CPU to stack several instances in a host. The presets carry most of the app, so anyone patching from scratch wants the oscillator and filter pages rather than the preset run.