Saga Synth

What it does

A rompler rather than a synth, built from samples of vintage Sega hardware, wrapped in an interface drawn as a Game Gear. Each patch layers two sounds with a mix knob between them, each side carrying level, tuning, fine tune, pan and its own ADSR, linked if you want them matched. Shaping comes from a circuit bit crusher, filter, resonator, sonic boom distortion, chip phaser, chip flanger, stereo delay, harmonic filter, auto pan, tremolo, mono with glide and reverb. A step sequencer runs to one layer or both, locks across preset changes, and already drives a good number of the presets. Over 350 sounds are included, drum kits among them.

In the demo

Jade runs several instances in GarageBand, moves to AUM to go control by control, plays through the Sega banks and the guest banks, then writes an RPG theme live using nothing else. A patch whose cutoff keeps snapping back turns out to be mapped to the mod wheel.

Worth knowing

It installs at 131 MB. Anyone after a programmable synth engine will find a sample player with deep shaping instead, and the sound set stays firmly retro.