Synth One J6

What it does

A free polysynth for iPhone, iPad and Mac, standalone and AUv3, built by volunteers and educators and aimed at schools where nothing can be bought from the App Store. Two DCOs carry sine, triangle, saw and square with a sub and noise, feeding a high pass and a filter with its own envelope. Effects run to a super saw of up to six voices, two choruses, two reverbs, widener, crush, auto pan, mono with glide and a tempo synced delay, alongside three LFOs, an arpeggiator, a step sequencer, two performance pads, a compressor and over 400 presets.

In the demo

Jade runs five instances in AUM under Playbeat and Fugue Machine, then builds from the default patch, routing an LFO into one step of the sequencer to get a generative line, and closes on the designer banks.

Worth knowing

No samples, so every sound comes from the two oscillators, and a tip jar is the only place money changes hands. A later update brought a free Mac build, preset sync over iCloud, a QWERTY typing keyboard, microtonal and Scala tunings, PWM and noise oscillators, a J106 filter, a J60 chorus and VoiceOver support.