Andrea wrote in to share about his free and open source software synthesizer built around the sound palette of black metal.
Built with JUCE, Galdr is a 12-voice instrument that pairs a subtractive engine with a morphing wavetable mode and an effects chain aimed at the genre, including tremolo picking and a dark FDN reverb. A granular layer called Blizzard adds noise textures on top of the synth voices.
Galdr features
- 12-voice engine with poly, mono and legato modes.
- Two band-limited (PolyBLEP) oscillators, up to 7-voice unison with detune and stereo spread, plus sub oscillator and white/pink noise.
- Morphing wavetable mode with 32 mip-mapped frames, sweeping from sine through saw to an inharmonic spectrum.
- Multimode filter: 12 and 24 dB lowpass, highpass, bandpass and vowel formant, with drive, dedicated envelope and keytracking.
- Two LFOs, glide, separate amp and filter envelopes.
- MPE per-note pitch bend and pressure, Scala (.scl) microtuning.
- Effects chain with 2x oversampling on the nonlinear stages: four distortion types, bitcrusher, ring modulator, chorus, tremolo picking, delay and an FDN cavern reverb with predelay.
- “Blizzard” granular texture layer.
- Tempo sync for the LFOs, tremolo and delay.
- Preset browser with factory and user presets, oscilloscope, spectrum analyser and on-screen MIDI keyboard.
- Resizable interface with tooltips.
Galdr is available to download in VST3, CLAP, AU and standalone formats for Windows, macOS and Linux. The source code is released under the GNU GPLv3.
More information: Sognevo
