I love the Ganymed VST. I've used it more than any other synth in my recordings, which says a lot, as I have some bigger name synths in my setup. I found it surprising...I'd be searching for a sound in my head and this one had something usable over and over again.

The presets are great and the interface is user-friendly. Ganymed's patches served well as leads, but it also has patches, and some cool arpeggiated presets. I appreciate the work that Stefan Kuhn did to make this great synth...and he released it for FREE. It's worth checking out at the very least. Unfortunately, there is not currently a version for OSX, but if you have a PC, this is a must-have synth. It doesn't use much processing, but the sounds are relatively complex and polyphonic. This makes it a great soft-synth for live performance and it is flexible for seeking that perfect patch.

I wonder what it is like on Ganymed right now. Isn't that strange to consider? There is a moon out there, at this moment, spinning in the orbit of our solar system. It has its own geography...its own ecosystem...crazy.

Ganymed was the first VSTi I ever played with, and it pretty much sold me on switching to a VSTi-centered workstation. I keep coming back to it for the Fairy Harp, Warm Bell Pad, Reso Guitar, and Pad 2 presets. Some of the other presets are strange for the kind of music I make, but they are interesting nevertheless. The more Indian-sounding presets might be right up your alley.

Ganymed--Vivaldi, too--has more versatility than I know what to do with. The presets alone convince me that it's capable of a plethora of interesting, even soul-stirring, sounds. Last time I checked, there was no manual, and I want one so badly that I offered to help edit/code the thing if it'll help get it out. (I try not to email developers of free programs, because I figure they're already giving away enough of their time without having to respond to tons of email; but I did write the author when I first downloaded Ganymed and got an immediate, very nice reply.) I want to understand how to tweak the settings to get sounds like those of my favorite Ganymed presets, so some tips on how to do that would be really nice.

Finally, I like the look: easy on the eye, smooth, well-organized, definitely classy.

3 operators are not a lot, the sound is not so complex, definitely very far from FM7 or other similar "big synts", but the sound could be sufficiently "fat" and "overdriven" thanks to the feedback on every oscillator. But the grat thing of this plugin is the simple but effective (and addictive!!) sequencer, you can trigger powerful techno riffs with one finger............ this sequencer is so strange to help composing "new" things, but not too difficult and complex to be useless and too heavy in terms of processing power.