🔮 Built-in Synthesizers and Instruments

Omni DAW features a rich palette of native synthesizers and built-in instruments, based on physical modeling, spectral and FM/PM synthesis, and resynthesis.

1. Alchemy (Spectral Alchemical Reactor)

Alchemy (builtin://alchemy) is a synthesizer whose sound comes from chemistry: you pick elements from the periodic table, each brings its own band-limited spectrum, and during a note it reacts with its neighbours. It is made for drones, ambient and evolving, spacious timbres.

• An element is a layer of spectrum: every element of the recipe is a layer of up to 16 sine partials (a voice renders up to 64, in SIMD). Its family comes from its place in the table (s/p/d/f block; metal, nonmetal, metalloid or noble gas), and every detail comes from the element's real data: ionisation energy (brightness), Pauling electronegativity (vowel, chorus), melting point (motion of the partials), density (string stiffness, bell hum) and atomic radius (the formant of its "body"). Twelve families: Pure (hydrogen, with a faint Balmer-line sparkle), Warm (alkali metals), Hollow (alkaline earths), Glow (noble gases), Voice (halogens and chalcogens, a sung vowel), Organic (C, N, P: a choir of detuned pairs), Crystal (metalloids), Bell (Cu, Ag, Au, Ni, Pd, Pt: bell partials), Metal, Liquid (Hg, Ga…), Radiant (lanthanides), Abyss (actinides). So the 118 elements sound different, and any mixture stays a clean set of tones, with no noise and no aliasing.
• Reactions instead of blend switches: neighbouring elements of the recipe are joined by bonds whose type follows their electronegativity difference. An ionic bond (e.g. NaCl) pours the timbre from donor to acceptor, a covalent one pulls nearby partials into unison (the beating slowly resolves), a polar one sways the layers in stereo, a metallic one runs a wave of the "electron sea" through the spectrum, and a noble gas does not react; it only blooms in space (heavy noble gases do react with fluorine, oxygen and chlorine, like XeF₂). Progress is first-order kinetics with an Arrhenius rate: Heat speeds it up, Evolution scales its pace and depth, Tension makes it reversible and oscillating (a Belousov–Zhabotinsky clock).
• Cauldron knobs: Heat (brightness, thermal motion of the partials, reaction rate), Pressure (thin to full spectrum), Magic (inharmonic stretch, breathing, longer swells, grains and shimmer), Color (spectral tilt), Warp (inharmonic stretch), Drift (the partials' own life), Strike (bowed to struck). The order of the elements in the tray is the shape of the molecule: drag a card sideways to change its neighbours.
• Spectral contour (the filter): the filter is an exact curve applied to the partial amplitudes. It has 11 shapes (Soft, Smooth, Steep, Band, Vowel, Prism, Tilt, Hollow, Air, Wave, Open), a resonance that cannot blow up, and Bloom, which opens the contour with the envelope. The display is interactive: drag horizontally for cutoff, vertically for resonance.
• Beads-style grain cloud: a granulator built on Mutable Instruments Beads algorithms (MIT licence): grain shapes from square through bell to reversed, grain stealing with crossfades (no clicks at any density), its stereo law, feedback through a soft limiter, and Freeze. Jitter scatters timing, place and size, and pitch jumps are always musical (octave, fifth); some grains play reversed.
• Space: a Griesinger/Dattorro plate with modulated lines (from Beads/Clouds) with Shimmer (octave-up feedback, so a held chord blooms upwards), plus Glow, a gentle 2× oversampled saturation.
• Modulation: two LFOs (LFO 1 breathes the contour, LFO 2 sways the spectral tilt and stereo width), a Marbles source and an 8-route Marbles matrix onto any knob.
• Grimoire and ampoules: 32 factory recipes in six families (Drones, Pads, Bells, Choirs, Textures, Arcana), TRANSMUTE (a random recipe with fitting knobs), WEATHER (a new seed: the same recipe, a cousin of its sound; saved with the project and reproducible bit for bit) and nine ampoules for your own patches (click: recall or store, right click: save over or clear).
• Live displays: the emission spectrum (partial lines in the elements' colours and a spectroscope band), the molecule with animated bonds and its kinetics ξ(t), the layer envelopes, the grain field (beads on the recording strand), the plate's halo, a scope and meters. When nothing plays, the displays show what a held C3 would play, computed by the same code as the engine.
• Old projects load (recipes, knobs, ampoules) and now sound through the new engine. Compound names still come from the Lovecraftian element "lexicon".

2. Omni Synth (16-Voice Hybrid Synthesizer)

Omni Synth (builtin://omni-synth) is the flagship hybrid subtractive synthesizer of Omni DAW, uniting the former separate Bass Synth and PolySynth modules into a single uncompromising instrument: from earth-shaking sub basses and 303 acid lines, through lush pads, polyphonic keys and cutting leads, to evolving multi-hour drones.

• Polyphony & Voices: 16-voice polyphony (controlled via the Voices knob) or Mono / Legato mode with adjustable Glide time and selectable note priority (Last, Low, High). True multi-voice unison of 1 to 8 voices per note with Detune control and JP-8000 style spread ($|c|^$) with alternating stereo panning, fractional phase sync, and analog Drift (slow organic pitch wander).
• Oscillators: Dual independent main oscillators with classic wave shapes (Sine, Saw, Square, Triangle, SuperSaw, Pulse PWM) plus ~25 Mutable Instruments Braids macro-oscillator algorithms (with Timbre and Color controls), dedicated sub-oscillator (1 or 2 octaves down), noise generator, and pre-mixer Warmth analog saturation. Unison is also available on OSC2. Oscillator mix modes: Blend, FM (true DX-style Phase Modulation — rock-solid pitch stability across all modulation depths), Ring Modulation, and Hard Sync.
• 18 Filter Modes: LP12, LP24 (true 4-pole Butterworth filter with exponential resonance mapping and Moog ladder passband loss compensation), HP, BP, Notch, Moog Ladder, Diode 303 (with Accent control), MS-20 LP/HP, Comb, plus models derived from the Filter FX: Korg 35 LP/HP, OB-Xd LP/BP/HP, Vintage Ladder, Cutoff Warp, and Resonance Warp. Non-linear filters run 2× oversampled on a shared half-band FIR filter (~75 dB rejection). For voices without stereo spread, the engine automatically switches filter and saturation paths to mono, cutting voice CPU load by 50%. Drive algorithms: Tanh / Fold / Asym, keytracking, velocity sensitivity, Filter FM, and Post Drive. The filter display plots the true engine response curve alongside real-time per-voice cutoff telemetry markers.
• Modulation Architecture: Independent DAHDSR envelopes for Amp, Filter, and Mod (attack times up to 20 s, decay/release up to 30 s, adjustable non-linear curvatures), 2 multi-shape LFOs (6 wave shapes, song-position tempo sync, retrigger, fade-in, shared phase option). Modulation destinations: cutoff, pitch, volume, resonance, drive, pan, sub, noise, SHAPE (PWM / Timbre), OSC2 pitch, MIX, and Vel→Amp. The track's global modulation rack (/docs/modulators) modulates parameters at control rate every 32 samples.
• Master Effects: Per-voice saturation with 10 distortion algorithms (2× oversampled), analog Juno-style chorus (3 modes with fractional phase interpolation), tempo-synced ping-pong delay, FDN reverb with Freeze (infinite decay tail), Bass Mono (monofies sub frequencies below a crossover point), and a transparent output limiter (linear below −1 dBFS).
• Drone Mode (Hold): Dedicated Hold latch button (and physical CC64 sustain pedal) holds notes and chords indefinitely, freeing both hands to sculpt timbre in real time.
• Smart Random (38 Styles): Built-in intelligent sound generator featuring 38 styles across 5 archetype families: Bass (Acid, Deep, FM, Heavy, Synth), Keys & Plucks, Pads, Leads, and Drones. Every randomized patch undergoes an offline engine rendering loudness check, guaranteeing optimal gain-staging within a ±3 dB target window without digital clipping.
• Solaris Interface with Live Telemetry: Modular egui panel expanding horizontally: OSCILLATORS tab (real-time waveforms and spectrum from DSP engine), FILTER (exact response and voice cutoff dots), ENVELOPES (drag-to-edit curves with animated phase dots), LFO, EFFECTS, VOICE (unison spread fan and voice allocation map), and OUTPUT (oscilloscope, peak meters, and limiter). Telemetry runs lock-free and updates only while notes are sounding, consuming zero idle CPU.

3. Iris (Image-to-Sound Synthesizer)

Iris is not a classic wavetable synthesizer — it is an image-to-sound resynthesis engine:

• An image (generated by AI or loaded by the user — see /docs/ai-generation) is "baked" into an additive Spectral Table: the image width corresponds to the number of frames over time, and the height corresponds to the number of harmonic partials.
• The pitch of the played note transposes the frequencies of the baked partials.
• Two independent Scan Heads read the table along the timeline in Linear, PingPong, or Spiral modes.
• The R/G/B channels of the image control three parallel modulation paths: amplitude, spectral tilt, and stereo panning.

The sonic result is similar to classic wavetable synthesis (smooth transitions and spectral scanning), but the underlying mechanism is image resynthesis, not the playback of pre-made wavetables.

4. TOMiC Drum Synth (Virtual Drum Machine)

TOMiC is a drum synthesizer based on physical modeling:

• 8-Pad Drum Grid: Default pad archetypes are Kick, Snare, HiHat, Bass, Tom, Percussion, Cymbal, FX — each with its own synthesis engine.
• Physical Modeling: Adjustable hammer strike, sub-tone purity, decay, and saturation depending on the pad archetype.
• Smart Randomizer: 6 kit randomization profiles (Random, Clean, Analog, Digital, Industrial, Chaos) that generate a new kit with a single click.

5. Piano (Physical Modeling Piano)

Piano is a physical model of a concert grand piano (felt hammer striking strings + coupling with the soundboard), without using sample libraries:

• Hammer and String Modeling: Each note is simulated as a set of multi-string (unison) voices.
• Sympathetic Resonance: A bank of 8 additional sympathetic resonance voices (neighboring strings in an octave, fifth/12th, octave down), activated by the sustain pedal.
• Expression Pedals: Full support for the Sustain pedal (CC64), Sostenuto (CC66), and Soft / Una Corda pedal (CC67).

6. Physical Modeling Suite

A set of seven distinct synthesizers based on mathematical and physical acoustic waveguide modeling:

• Plucked Synth & Harp Synth & Guitar Synth: Advanced plucked string engine powered by Extended Karplus-Strong physical modeling with Thiran all-pass fractional delay filters (pitch accuracy within ±2 cents), linear-phase loss damping filters (where Decay corresponds to true T60 ringout time in seconds), string stiffness dispersion, and physical pluck excitation modeling (pick point, finger width, attack brightness). Features stereo resonant instrument bodies (Pluck Body for mandolin / guitar / harp) and sympathetic resonance string halos (Sympathetic Strings in Harp Synth governed by the Sympathy knob).
• Violin Synth: Bowed waveguide model (in the style of the STK library) with modal wooden body resonance — simulating rosin stick-slip friction dynamics.
• Flute Synth & Reed Synth: Wind waveguide models (ports of Flute and Reed models) — simulating lip-embouchure jet airflow in the flute and non-linear reed vibration physics in the clarinet/saxophone.
• Modal Synth (Mallet): Additive modal bandpass resonator bank for acoustic simulation of vibraphones, tubular bells, marimbas, and tuned metallic percussion.