Roxsyn Guitar Synthesizer

What it does

Synthesises the audio coming off a guitar or bass directly, so the instrument drives a polyphonic synth with no guitar to MIDI conversion in between. The sounds are organised into preset banks: two sections of arps, two of basses, two of leads, pads, and a last section of stranger patches whose names give nothing away. Voicings are adjustable, and it runs standalone with a guitar plugged in or inside a host.

In the demo

Jade loads it into GarageBand through Inter-App Audio, where it can be picked as either an instrument or an effect, then spends the episode playing presets through an electric rather than editing anything. The arp banks run from a single held note. She points out the in-app toolbar that drives GarageBand’s transport, so recording does not need a trip back to the DAW.

Worth knowing

Jade treats it as something to drop into a track already underway rather than to start one with, and says she has barely edited a patch across three songs of use. Nothing in this episode touches the synth engine’s own controls.