- Synth1
- The built-in sampler in OpenMPT
- VSTSynthFont (the best at just straightforward SF2 playback)
- PICO-8's built-in synth(honestly kind of awful but if I'm making a PICO-8 game, that's the option)
- Casio SA-46
For the rest, I'm liking doing the low-fi sampler/rompler/toy-keys thing. I have the licenses for much heavier plugins, but I don't have those installed on this laptop. But it's quite easy to keep the old Digital Sound Factory libraries around as a default, and VSTSynthFont gets out of the way and lets me just use that stuff. It's reflective of a gradual shift in how I've been thinking about workflow: if I want most of my focus to be on the macro-scale of production, I need to minimize the time I spend on sound design, and we have decades of good synth patch concepts to draw upon. Sometimes it helps to give the knobs a little tweak, but more often it's solvable with mix and arrangement decisions: What am I communicating and what timbres should I emphasize to communicate it the best at this moment? That's something that I can't get just by auditioning a cool sounding patch. The cool sounding patch will make me go "whoa, that's cool," and then spend the next few hours redesigning the track around it, because I didn't go in knowing what I was designing in the first place.
Now, arpeggiators, chord generators, step sequencers, that kind of thing, I can still get excited about. Those are very impactful and lead me to more happy accidents. I especially enjoy working with stuff like ChordPulse as a starting point because it suggests what a track *could* be when arranged, before I go and try to write any parts in detail.
Edit: Oh, and I did get a copy of Synthmaster last month. But I got the $9 library player version, cause hey, cheap preset source
