Texture

This synth is one of my favourite free synths available.

It basically consist of one oscillator (!), a filter, effects (reverb, delay and 'metal') and an onboard sequencer.

It's incredible what you can do with just one oscillator, you can't believe it. I'm not making allowances, this synth is capable of everything: pads, basses, leads and even percussion, and thanks to its filters and effects, including that 'metal' effect, it almost always sounds crisp, hard, very very suitable for industrial music, for instance.

Its's a bit absurd to describe its basic functions: oscillators through effects, modelled by an adsr envelope with also a filter envelope, then through effects and voilá you have a great sound.

The user interface is clear. The sound is amazing, but again, you have to love abrassive sounds, though it can do many other things of course. The synth used to be monophonic, but the new version is polyphonic. The documentation is very correct, Ugo even give us a manual with everything explained in detail. There are many presets, and most of them are very very good: from basses to pads through leads. It's free. It's very stable, it has never crashed on my sequencer (FL). Its cpu usage is not low, mind!, but it's not too high either. The synth deserves it.

All Ugo synths are very good: String Theory, Motion, Rez. But Texture is my favourite of them all. Try it.

this is an exceptionally good mono synth.

the sounds great, and the filters are among the best ive heard. with the filter's drive, well implimented resonance, and dual peak design, you can get some powerful sounds that many few others can touch. an interesting feature here is the osc 'harmony' setting, that adds another voice at a frequency offset. perhaps this is more cpu efficient than a second osc ?

pros -- clean, solid sound. excellent filters. easy to program.

cons -- fixed modulation routing, trance gate does not appear to sync to host tempo properly

i highly recommend this plug

I think the previous review goes over the features quite well. Texture is a good vst made great by the free price. It's a fairly straight-forward, simple to use instrument which can come in handy on many tunes. I particularly like the sequencer module which is used to modify the amplitude. You can really texturize your sounds here. The bandpass filter can quickly take your sound to extremes. The graphics is one of my few complaints. It's hard to read some of the labels. The type is too small in the green windows. However, if you pass your mouse over a control and wait a second, a popup label will appear and tell you what it is. The other minor complaint I have is when changing octave or harmony, the sequence only goes up one way. If you are at "0" and want to go to "-1" you must click "0,1,2,3,-2,-1" to get there. The saving of presets is left to the host. The FX (reverb and delay) are very simple, but are very effective. Texture seems very stable and very usable.

Okay, you're a stupid twat if you don't have this monosynth in your arsenal and you deserve to die. (If you weren't aware of the raves Texture has received, or even Texture's existence, then forget the previous sentence.) Simply put, this is one of the most unique and usable monosynths around, free or not. It's attactive and surprisingly professional-looking. It's got a ton of presets which are all wonderful. Has a wide frequency range. Only downside is that sometimes the parameters of a tweaked preset in a song will change when you re-open the project. So save those patches if you tweak them!

Let yourself not be fooled by the SE stamp that is on Texture for the sound is rich, warm, grungy and unique.

Heart of this machine is the most excellent bandpas filter that gives the overall sound a unique character. Like the name says this synth is able to create textures that could be used as layered parts of a sound, or can stand on its own quite. It may take a little bit of tweaking before you will appreciate in full the capabilities of this synth. With a full bank of 128 presets you will find enough starting points to find your own way through the sounds of this machine.

A closer look at some of its features: -
The single oscillator comes with its usual features and 7 waveforms with an added lfo for pwm-modulation. The downsampler slider allows for adding grungyness and even complete nastyness of the sound

Then the heart of this synth: the monstrous band pass filter. Together with the highly resonant low pass filter and the possibilities to adjust the weight of each filter and the synced filter-modulation you will find these filters to be capable to not only scream at you, but tweaking them will open a world of sounds for you. The sliders allow stepless precision tweaking.
The distortion and envelope section help you shape the sound to your fullest satisfaction.

The FX section comes with a mix feature to adjust the amount of FX on a sound and with the Reverb, Delay and Metal feature you’ll be able to give the sound created even more character. The Metal/clang feature actually is a super fast delay that allows to add metallic tones to the sound. A feature well worth playing with, as it produces sounds you may not have expected at first glance.

Lastly the gate sequencer feature with its adjustable mix enables to change the sounds into unique (trance-like) sequences.

All in all a high featured soft synth with a unique character; and it is totally free. It comes with a manual in which is also a midi CC- graphic to allow real time tweaking as well.

A winner on all fronts, and the best thing is its free.