AnaMark LF

This is one of those synths that I've almost wiped off my hard drive, but always stayed my hand at the last key stroke for some reason.

It's fairly basic - after all, it's a freebie version done as a taster for the fuller featured bigger brother.
It's mono (no shame in that - monos are still very useful for leads and basses). There are no FX (for me this is no problem - I often feel FX mask the true character of a VSTi).

The reason I've nearly deleted it is because it seems to have not much middle ground - it's basically a very digital sounding synth - it's designed to be - but that can really be a problem with a monosynth - digital basslines just rarely cut it in a mix - with leads it's not such a problem, but LF is either very quiet and bland, or it screams out with digital nastiness. Either way, even with a lead, it's difficult to get it to sit in a mix happily.

You can tone down the nastiness, but then it seems to lose any character at all. Some of the obscure knobs can occasionally produce a really useable patch though - you can twiddle all of the knobs to no effect whatsoever, but just one knob will get the right sound - this is also another reason I nearly deleted it; The knob terminology is so ridiculously obscure, that I have no idea what most of them do. I like programming synths - I like complicated ones and I like programming from scratch - but I still have no idea what I'm doing with LF - just bad labelling IMO.

I've still got LF because just on the odd occasion you want a bit of real noise and crunch - well it can do that quite well. In fact, I'd say LF is more suited to making industrial sounds, and if that is your style maybe it's a good synth to own. I can imagine the full version with more features could be quite useful, but LF is so "only just there" that I have never investigated it. Basically for the usual dancey stuff or pop or accoustic and most probably for rock, I don't think LF has alot of use. Grungey electro, industrial experimental then go for it - it's free anyway so what's to lose?

I really don't like to knock freebies, but this one rarely does anything for me - I only keep it because once in every 30 or so songs - I find some kind of use for it (and I'm a sad synth collector - I find it very difficult to get rid of 'em)Read Review