Music Production & Songwriting

Songwriting & Music Production

Making music from scratch is a chaotic creative process. Synfire is an intelligent companion that helps you develop ideas and bring them to life.

With a DAW it's easy to fire up a drum loop, add a bass line and some sustained chords. Everybody can do this in a few minutes and that's what it sounds like: All the same. Boring. Styles and genres come and go over time, but at the core it's recognizable musical expressions that make the difference. Synfire is a great workbench where you can find these ingredients and put them together.

The Confines Of a DAW

Exploring different chord progressions and instrumental phrasings is extremely cumbersome with a DAW. Notes are static. Sometimes the best ideas for chords or phrasings come when most of a song is already done. Anything you want to alter you need to re-record yourself (if you can play it), or edit the piano roll, note by note and instrument by instrument (if you can get the rhythm right).

Some plug-ins offer help with chords but they can't control your song as a whole. Editing individual tracks inside a plug-in window is awkward. Chord tracks can't do magic either. Forcing notes into a grid simply doesn't cut it.

And last but not least, you can only record something that you are able to play. It's easy to get stuck in routine and lose motivation. How often did you leave a song unfinished or compromised because you ran out of ideas, or felt that starting over would be too much of a hassle?

Why Synfire

Some apps and plug-ins use hard-wired styles and put an emphasis on instant gratification. They are easy to use at first, but the music pretty much sounds all the same.

We didn't want to dumb Synfire down at the expense of your creative freedom. You retain full control. In the end, you will have created something that no one else could have created in the same way. We believe that's what makes music special.

Synfire also handles hand-made and unquantized music. Don't squeeze your music into small boxes. Synfire arranges things in a fluid and natural way.

The Freedoms Of Synfire

The Big Picture

Everything in your song is dynamic and responsive to changes in harmony and many other parameters.
Create editable instrumental phrases that breathe life into your music.
Be inspired by happy accidents and surprises (hooks, melodies, rhythms).
Embrace musical styles beyond your routine and habits.
Get results so fast that you can judge them more objectively.
Benefit from Synfire's unparalleled intelligence.
Intuitively apply the theory of music.
Escape writer’s block.

Harmony

Intuitively surf keys, scales and chords to build chord progressions.
Replace harmony at any time without touching anything else.
Find chords that best match a melody.
Collect chord progressions in libraries and use them to try different variants of your song.
Use the theory of music to your advantage.

Instrumental Parts (Phrases)

Intuitively draw bass figures, chord stabs, melodies and arpeggios.
Edit and fine-tune phrases while they remain always editable.
Assemble long phrases from smaller ones with easy drag & drop.
Grab phrases from previous songs and insert them into new songs.
Generate thousands of phrases that sound natural and make sense (Pro). A single phrase can be the starting point and inspiration for an entire song.
Collect phrases and drum loops in libraries and use them as building blocks.
Import phrases from MIDI files.

Arrangements

Make sections for Intro, Verse, Chorus or A, B, C and resize or move them at any time.
When sections are moved around, their phrases adapt to the harmony automatically.
Phrases automatically develop variations as the chord progression advances.
Smoothly blend one phrase into another with morphing (Pro).
Compose music around existing tracks in a DAW that's synchronized with Synfire (e.g. vocals).
Drop phrases on a Snippets grid and play them as real-time live loops.
Export your finished song to a DAW for production.

Although Synfire hosts your instruments (audio plug-ins) and offers basic mixing capabilities, it doesn't want to replace your DAW or notation program. It is meant to complement them. You can export your work in part or as a whole with drag & drop. Or save Standard MIDI Files (SMF) and notation formats like MusicXML and LilyPond.

If songwriting is relatively new for you, Synfire is a wonderful companion that can assist you along the way. If you are an experienced musician, Synfire can give many fresh impulses and new inspiration.

Examples

Providing music examples for Synfire is much like cooking example meals for a kitchen. The food doesn't really say much about the kitchen. At the risk of totally missing your taste, please check out a few examples we have done for testing Synfire's features.

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All features mentioned on this page are included with the Pro edition. The Sparks and Express editions may not support all of them. Please refer to the product comparison page for details.