Composing Music

Synfire is an intelligent assistant and workbench for composing and rapidly prototyping music. It is at its best when there are multiple instrumental parts, melodies, counterpoint, non-repetitive harmony, and a narrative structure.

Navigate keys, scales and chords. Build progressions with drag and drop. Make your own palettes. Listen to sketches playing your chords in real-time.

Draw, import, record and edit hundreds of phrases. Your personal repertoire of musical expressions.

Collect phrases and parameters in a library. Use them to build new arrangements.

Insert phrases into a structure. Build a musical narrative. Rearrange it any time.

Compose dynamically with Snippets in real-time

Generate random phrases and harmonies that sound human and natural (Pro)

Find harmonies that match a melody or any input

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The Limits Of DAWs

Creative work benefits greatly from experimentation. But a DAW does not offer any facilities to collect, edit and combine reusable components. With many instrumental parts, articulations and non-trivial harmony, making far-reaching changes to an evolving score is even more difficult compared to songwriting. For example, just try to change a harmony progression for a dozen instruments after the fact, because you found that a IV-V-I cadence works much better at that point. Sometimes the best ideas come when most of a piece is already done.

How many times have you settled for a compromise because it would be too much trouble to make these changes or start over? That's a pity, because you are falling short of your potential. Don't put yourself in a straitjacket.

The Freedoms Of Synfire

The Big Picture

• Everything in your arrangement is dynamic and responsive to changes in harmony and many other parameters.
• Arrange your work with broad strokes and let Synfire figure out the details.
• Create editable instrumental phrases that breathe life into your music.
• Be inspired by happy accidents and surprises (motifs, themes, rhythms).
• Get results so fast that you can judge them more objectively.
• Embrace musical styles beyond your routine and habits.
• Intuitively apply the theory of music.
• Escape writer’s block.

Harmony

• Intuitively surf keys, scales and chords to build harmony progressions.
• Replace harmony at any time without touching anything else.
• Find chords that best match one or more melodies.
• Collect progressions in libraries and use them to try different variants of your score.
• Create your own harmony system with custom interval structures for scales and chords.
• Create your own chord palettes based on customized relationships.
• Use the theory of music to your advantage.

Instrumental Parts (Phrases)

• Intuitively draw and transform melodic runs, chords and rhythms.
• Assemble longer phrases from smaller ones with drag & drop.
• Take musical expressions from your previous works and insert them into new ones.
• Import phrases from classical composers and other MIDI files.
• Collect phrases in libraries and use them as your building blocks.
• Generate random phrases that sound natural and make sense (Pro).
• Only a single phrase can be the starting point and inspiration for an entire project.
• Articulations are attached directly to musical fragments and stick there when you move them around (Pro).

Arrangements

• Move, resize, nest and combine any number of sections and fill them with phrases.
• When sections are moved around, their phrases adapt to the new surrounding.
• Move a phrase to a different instrument while Synfre recomposes it to match the pitch range. If necessary, this even breaks melodic runs apart and rearranges them to fit.
• Phrases automatically develop variations as harmony progresses over time.
• Smoothly blend one phrase into another with morphing (Pro).
• Drop phrases on a Snippets grid and play them as real-time live loops.

If composing music is relatively new for you, Synfire is a wonderful companion that can assist you along the way. If you are an experienced professional, 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.

Music Examples Video Tutorials

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Synfire - The Second Generation

Making a monster application like this takes a lot of time and effort. We worked hard to make Synfire 2 more powerful and much easier to use than its predecessor.

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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.