Great freeware plugin for those heavy detuned lead sounds like the JP8000. It also creates rich pads and synth strings. This one is a bit harder to learn since it offers a lot of functions. But you get into it after some time.

Price: Free
Difficulty: medium CPU: medium  Listen   Source

A great and versatile synth plugin with a lot of features. Quite complex but you will learn how it works.

Price: Free
Difficulty: hard CPU: low  Listen   Source

Very easy and intuitive VST instrument resembling a famous acid bassline, the CPU usage is very low and perfect for slow systems.
(Available in the Muon Collection package.)

Price: Free
Difficulty: easy CPU: low  Listen   Source

Texture offers a wide range of textures. Smooth, odd digital ambiences, metallic rings, synthetic percussion, brutally distorted sounds, classic virtual analog sounds, and even some physical modeling type tones are all possible with this synth.


Features:

* Virtual Analog.
* Mono/Poly operation.
* Detune.
* Harmony.
* Pulse Width + modulation.
* FM.
* Downsampler.
* Monstrous Band Pass Filter.
* Highly Resonant Low Pass Filter.
* Distortion.
* 2 Envelopes.
* 3 LFOs.
* Reverb.
* Metal Module with modulation.
* Dual Delay with MIDI sync and pan.
* 16 Step Gate Sequencer.
* Gate length control.
* 128 Patches By: Ugo. Mark Stolk (Mystahr) and Tim Conrardy.

Noticeably more CPU efficient than the Superwave P8, The T-Pro's sixty-four powerful trance leads are able to cut through a mix with ease, and sixty four preset arpeggios assist the musician in the development of awesome trance.

Transcender has minimal controls for fast and easy tweaking, but there's a lot going on inside, it features a single slider to mathematically detune a large bank of oscillators mixed in stereo through twin low pass filters, there's a slider on the output to control the stereo width. Transcender was primarily designed for trance leads, but can produce quite a range sounds.

Great and very popular monosynth with a unique sound.

* 2 Oscillators with multiple waveforms
* Pitch, Filter and Amp envelope generators with velocity, scaling and amplitude controls
* 3 LFOs
* Portamento
* Multi-mode filter with resonance
* Noise generator
* Oscillators, filter and amplifier controllable by Aftertouch, mod wheel and velocity
* Stereo spread
* Echo
* Extensive MIDI implementation: Portamento on/off, time, volume, Aftertouch, sustain switch, modulation, pitchbend, breath, velocity, cutoff, resonance, detune, transpose, osc1wave, osc2wave, delay level and a lot more
* Three keying modes: Fingered, High note priority legato, Full legato
* Many features can be disabled to save CPU
* Outstanding look with wooden surround by Matthys L.C. van Amsterdam (Alterex)

Monophinic versatile synth especially good for fat basslines and heavy detuned lead synth sounds. The GUI could be structured easier to see where each part belongs to which would make it easier to understand the whole thing.

High quality Synthersizer, Wavesample Player,
Multi-Function Sequence Controller, Multi-F/X
and a whole lot more...

The synthesizer that was responsible for creating all sounds in the famous farbrausch intros such as .the .product, poemtoahorse, Candytron, Flybye and of course the 96 kilobyte shoot-em-up .kkrieger.