Patch Play Means Never Buying a Hardware Synth Again! – Sounds and Presets
Or does it..?
3,5 / 5,0 | 
Imagine never having to save up the hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds to buy a hardware synth again. With Patch Play from Synth Palace, that’s exactly what they’re asking you to do!
Sounds and Presets
Patch Play for Arturia Pigments by Synth Palace
Could you ever conceive of the concept of never having to buy another expensive hardware synth again, and instead, buy libraries of patches for a single software synth that gives you the sounds of all of those instruments for way less than the cost of just one classic synth?
Nope, me either! But… there is a market out there for classic synth sounds on a budget. Not everyone has that much disposible income, not least the space to store all this hardware, so maybe a cool, one-stop software alternative isn’t such a crazy thought after all. Enter Patch Play from Synth Palace.
The guys at Synth Palace are banking on this with their Patch Play sound banks for Arturia’s Pigments 6. Using its extensive synthesis capabilities, Synth Palace has sampled loads of great instruments and then created deeply multi-sampled instruments within Pigments.
Patch Play consists of four core banks, each dealing with a different kind of synth. There’s Analog (Prophet 5, Moog One, PolyBrute 12, etc.), Experimental (UDO Super Gemini, Moog Grandmother, Rhodes Chroma, etc.), Vintage (Minimoog, OBX8, Jupiter 8, CS80, etc.) and Digital (DX7, Arturia MicroFreak, etc).
They also throw in packs of one-shot samples, loops and phrases so you can start making your hit with Patch Play right away. It’s a neat idea, and not one that hasn’t been done before. I recall buying sample CDs in the 90s dedicated to samples from classic vintage gear that was well out of my price range!
There are numerous Patch Play bundle deals available on their website, so it’s worth checking out what their latest offers are.
Free Behringer Pro-800 Sound Pack by Marc Barnes Sounds
When I speak with colleagues about their favourite Behringer synth, the Pro-800 is one that keeps coming up as one of the favourites. Listening to this brilliant set of free sounds from Marc Barnes, I can see why it is held in such high regard.
Based on the Sequential Prophet 600, this little keyless synth, which can also be thrown into a Eurorack case, does a pretty decent job of getting close to the sound of the original and, possibly because of those two extra voices, exceeding it.
At just €249, it’s a real steal for an 8-voice polysynth and, in good hands, it can be made to sound rather lovely. On this occasion, those hands belong to Marc Barnes, a prolific sound designer and musical director from Scotland.
This free bank is exclusively available through another freebie, the Swumpf Pro 800 editor, a web-based tool for programming, editing and saving your presets and those of others. Simply connect your Pro-800 and click the loader button.
You can then access the 20 free sounds created by Marc. Not only that, you can inspect his programming and adjust to your own taste, should you wish. And Marc isn’t the only contributor of sounds within Swumpf. There’s at least an additional half dozen or so banks, so dig in!
Check out Marc’s other sound banks at his website!
Moxie Pop Soundset for Moog Slim Phatty and Little Phatty by Kulshan Studios
Kulshan Studios is back with some more love for the smaller Moog synths, this time the Slim and Little Phattys! These two siblings represent Moog’s entry-level synthesizers but they’ve still become firm favourites amongst the Moog cognoscenti.
Once again, aiming fairly and squarely at the modern pop market (think Taylor Swift, Charlie XCX, Chapelle Roan, Lady Gaga, et al), these sounds give you all of that bright, slick and buzzy tone that these recording artists make great use of, or so my kids tell me!
For $23 of your U.S. dollars, you get 60 patches that will tickle your pop fancy all night long. There are some very juicy sounds in here as well as plenty of plucks and leads as well as some interesting effects type patches.
Check them out at the Kulshan Studios website, along with their other Phatty patches!
Umbra Rhythms for U-He Zebralette by Anton Anru
U-He’s Zebralette is a free software synth that it, to all intents and purposes, a cut down version of their powerful Zebra synth. But even with just one Zebra oscillator and one envelope generator, it is still capable of producing some very cool sounds.
This is a fact not lost on Anton Anru who has produced a free pack of 25 rhythmic sounds for it. Umbra Rhythms is a small collection, in Anton’s words, “dark, playful and rhythmical sounds”. There are all sorts of weird and wonderful things going on here, all of which are, as the name suggests, very rhythmical.
You can’t fault free sounds for a free synth, so why not grab both and have some fun? Just head to Anton’s site and if you like what you hear, why not buy him a coffee (or beer) to say thank you!
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3 responses to “Patch Play Means Never Buying a Hardware Synth Again! – Sounds and Presets”
We’ve got a better idea. A single keyboard, possibly PI, with a fold down colour screen, a load of knobs and switches, that will host ANY soft synth you install on the SD card. With controller mapping setup for each synth function displayed on the screen, a hands-on multi-instrument. You’d have 10560456 different VSTs to choose from, with a velocity keyb, poly aftertouch, mod and pitch wheels, and a plugin mouse if required. It’d cost a grand or so for the barebones keyboard, and whatever they charged you for old and new VSTs, but you’d only need 1 keyboard for live or studio work, with 967432 patches for each VST. We had the idea 15 years ago, by the way, but no takers as yet
I had a similar idea 10yrs ago, but instead of your solution which is the better one in regards to bang for buck and access to unimaginable sized libraries inside the one product, I envisaged something roland kinda ended up touching on with the aria range. You buy a hardware keyboard that has slots available for different modules. These slots would accept individual function modules & synth modules that were built to an industry agreed upon standard and have a plug n play & hot swappable capability. Then developers like say Moog could release different modules that contain the filters from different synths of theirs. Or oscillators & envelopes. Punters could also just buy the entire synth as a module that could be plugged in and used as is. Developers of all shapes & sizes could release their synths as modules, as uniformity would see a drop in production costs as more and more synth modules and individual units are built to the same spec. Imagine being able to experiment and put Moog filters in with prophet envelopes & juno oscillators. Now it could be beefed up with wavetable modules,, karplus modules, there could even be modulation modules like vocoders and fx modules from puig eqs to 500 series like compressor modules as well as distortions, delays and reverbs. Your idea has far greater universal appeal and would cost substantially less than mine, but its hard not to see the appeal in what I’ve suggested here as well. I like to think its the hardware synth enthusiasts highest bucket list item they never knew existed lol.
lol