The year in noisemaking

Freeware instruments have never been thin on the ground – particularly during the first rush of DIY synths and soundfont players that flooded the scene after Jeff McClintock added ‘Save as VST’ to his SynthEdit modular construction kit for Windows back in 2002.

The idea of building plugins in a modular environment is still a powerful one, and this is one reason why we selected the open-source HISE to top our list in this year’s roundup. HISE is a cross-platform application designed to allow users to build their own virtual instruments. It puts the emphasis on sampling, but also offers basic synthesis and effects processing tools.

With HISE, users get the ability to build custom patches from sample collections or synthesis, embed them, create a graphic user interface, and then compile the whole shebang as a VST, AU or AAX plugin or even as an iOS app! It’s free if you don’t sell your creations for money – otherwise, there are licence fees to pay.

For those who’d rather not bother exporting a monolithic masterpiece, HISE serves as an excellent plugin sampler and instrument in its own right – something we’ll touch on in the following tutorial. You can grab your copy of HISE at hise.audio.

And it’s not the only buildingblock kit to walk the stage in 2017 – Darwin Arts’ Trilobite Free gets a look in as well. A complex and quirky construction kit for instruments and effects, it provides 18 modules to help you achieve your personal sonic bliss.

We’ll also take a look at NUSofting’s Noisetar, a synthesiser with an unusual approach to sound generation.