Pure Synth® Platinum

This synth is the best sounding synth I have heard for iOS urban and all around electronic music creation. I got into mobile music production about six months ago from outboard gear and computer based virtual instruments so my standards are high. I’ve tried and used everything from Yamaha, Roland, Kontakt, Halion, SampleTank, Bram Bos, etc. and this synth is awesome! The sounds are clear and have a lot of character which is important for me when making music that stands out. It’s a stand alone and works as an audio unit plugin which is a must for me. I use it in Cubasis and transfer my tracks to Cubase for vocal production and mixing. The sound library is a massive 6 gb which may me to much for some but is Perfect for me! You can choose not to download the extra files to save space. I like this so much I am considering the desktop version for Cubase. Awesome work Gospel Musicians keep up the good work.

**Update** Less than 10 hours after I posted this review, the developer released an update that seems to have fixed almost all of what I mentioned below. Not sure if it was in direct response, but thanks for the fix & quick turnaround. Updating to a four star review & purchasing Bassalicious 2. *Old review below* I’ll start by saying that I love the sounds in this plugin, however, it doesn’t do me much good because of the bugs and stability issues. Prior to this most recent update, Pure Synth would work intermittently in BeatMaker 3. On a good day, I could open a project with 2 or 3 instances of Pure Synth and it’d play with no issues, but more often than not the plugin would crash and I’d have to close/open the project until it decided to cooperate. This most recent update seems to have lessened the amount of crashes, however, there are now two issues: either no sound output from one or more instances of Pure Synth when multiple instances are in one project (synth UI shows the keys are being ‘pressed’, but no sound is coming out), or if the sound does play from an instance, the output is EXTREMELY low (around -33db when volume fader set to 0). Please fix this. I’d love to pickup Bassalicious 2, but no way I can do it in good conscious with the issues I’ve experience with PSP. Running this on an 2017 iPad Pro with 512GB storage.

As an artist who writes most music with a Guitar or Piano as my main source of inspiration, I find myself getting into a rut! So I will turn to another instrument to spark an idea. However, using synths with physical modeling, or FM synths no matter how good they sound never really get the juices flowing per se’. So I find myself using the app “Thumb Jam” all the time! Tonight when I seen that Pure Synth Platinum was 50% off, I bought it, not knowing how truly amazing this thing sounds. You can hear the hammer of the keys from the piano fall and release! Sheesh! It was jaw dropping! I would have NEVER EVER WAITED this long had I known how good this sounds! Do yourself a favor, and treat yourself! I am NOT hyping this thing up... I don’t get anything for writing this review, I’m just a normal guy who wishes I would have bought this a LONG time ago!

I picked this up initially on the strength of both Jamal’s demos and the ability to layer 4 sounds for JV-1080 style patches. I soon discovered that the deep library of waveforms and samples (all bundled with purchase, no paying extra for DLC!) makes it possible to match something like 90-95% of classic synth sounds, provided you have the ear for it. This was recently improved further by the addition of 12db/octave filters, which make CS80 and Oberheim style sounds more authentic. The samples that aren’t in the library (Juno is a big one for me) typically have close matches in the generic “Saw” and “Square” categories if you dig for them. TBH I haven’t used the “acoustic” sounds for much but I like knowing that they’re there. The effects are also top notch. I have EOS-2 and FAC Chorus but if it came down to it I would have no trouble dialing in close matches from the internal FX. The only thing missing is a true random Wow and Flutter for BOC-esque sounds, and I get that from TB-ReelBus. You can create or imitate virtually any subtractive or sample-based sound from the analog and early-digital eras on this synth, and give all but the most labyrinthine software synths a run for their money. And it’s portable.

I bought this in the Amun’s 2019 intro promotion. Quite frankly, the first time I ran it, it drove me crazy (2019 iPad Air) with glitches and dropouts on some sounds. Then I closed a bunch of other programs and it ran fine. Prior to this, my main source for romper sounds have been SampleTank, GarageBand, and KORG M1. Pure synth offers a lot more variety in the piano and orchestral categories especially. It is much better for synth sounds than M1 as it has portamento. Pure Synth does not have drums or percussion as of now., but my other instruments cover that pretty well.