Spitfire Audio has announced the release of a deep hybrid synthesizer created in collaboration with Grammy-nominated composer, producer and technologist BT.
The result of Spitfire Audio and BT’s third collaboration since 2017, Phoenix brings together unique sounds drawn from BT’s extensive musicmaking archive of vintage synthesizer, sampler, cassette, and vinyl sounds with distinctive orchestral recordings from Spitfire’s premium libraries. The resulting instrument offers producers and sound designers a highly authored, cinematic palette for modern scoring, detailed sound design and spectral manipulation.
BT describes the approach behind Phoenix as ‘New Primitives’, a way of thinking about synthesis based on operations and architectures that go beyond conventional approaches and presets.
This is reflected in Phoenix’s stereo-from-the-ground-up design with two complete synthesis chains per voice, one for each channel. This allows the two sides of a sound to be shaped independently, creating movement, detuning, spectral modulation, phase warps and spatial detail in parallel, as part of the synthesis process itself.
Phoenix is built with six powerful synthesis engines, including spectral wavetables, hyper-modern FM and deep sampling, alongside 2OP FM transients, subharmonic generation, and a complex noise oscillator. These can be combined and modulated across the instrument, giving composers extensive scope to transform source material and create sounds that evolve over time.
“This is true cross-synthesis,” says BT. “I’ve spent my entire life exploring synthesis modalities, built on the back of giants, to be sure, and combined and augmented this way, none of this existed before, not even in a related form. This is a dream inspiration engine fully realized.”
BT’s private collection sits alongside a curated selection of the most iconic and unique detailed sample instruments from Spitfire Audio’s libraries, including fifty instruments spanning strings, brass, woodwind, choirs, guitars, pianos, and tuned percussion. The selection complements BT’s diverse archive and reaches far from the familiar center of the orchestral palette, including frozen strings, quarter-tone clusters and bowed textures at the edge of pitch. The recordings are designed to be resynthesized and re-engineered through Phoenix’s synthesis, modulation and effects architecture into something completely unique by composers looking to create evolving, screen-ready soundscapes.
Movement is central to Phoenix. Eight multi-segment MetaSequencers, four random generators with 636 handmade rhythm patterns and a probability arpeggiator derived from the rhythmic language of BT’s patented Stutter Edit give composers multiple ways to introduce variation and evolution. “One patch, one note, and an entire track or score cue starts to unveil itself,” says BT.
“Our collaboration with BT now spans more than a decade, which has allowed us to build a deep creative connection and explore radical new approaches to synthesis together,” said Paul Thomson, co-founder of Spitfire Audio. “Phoenix gives composers brand new ways of combining and transforming source material with unique synthesis techniques in ways not typically found within a single synthesiser, from subtle movement and evolving texture to aggressive cutting edge tones, all the way to deeply cinematic, immersive soundscapes.”
Phoenix features
- 6 synthesis engines per voice: spectral wavetables, FM, sampler, 2OP FM transients, sub and noise, all cross-modulating.
- Stereo from the ground up: two independent synthesis chains per voice, one per channel.
- 6-operator FM engine with 34 algorithms; 8-voice unison stacks up to 48 operator-oscillators into a single note.
- Stereo wavetable engine with deep spectral warping and modal resynthesis.
- Modulation matrix with no slot limit; eight meta sequencers; probability arpeggiator built on Stutter Edit’s rhythmic language.
- 37 studio quality bespoke effects, each with its own interface, from spectral smearing to shimmering granular reverbs, low fidelity vinyl emulation to vast shimmer reverbs.
- Real-time 3D renderer that draws the actual waveform being synthesized: after every warp, after every spectral stage, as an object you can take hold of and turn.
- 16-voice full MPE.
Phoenix for Windows and macOS (VST3, AU, AAX and standalone) is available at an introductory price of £199 GBP until October 25th, 2026 (regular £249 GBP).
More information: Spitfire Audio / Phoenix
