Music Production & Songwriting

Writing a song or starting a new track of dance music, or Jazz, R&B, HipHp, Electronic, Pop, LoFi or whatever, is always a chaotic creative process. Synfire can ignite the first spark and act as an intelligent assistant to help you develop your ideas and bring them to life.

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

The Limits Of DAWs

Notes in a DAW are static. Changing the chords of a song after the fact is cumbersome. Replacing an instrumental track with a different phrasing means you have to record it yourself (if you can play it), or draw it manually, note by note (if you can get the rhythm right). And sometimes the best ideas for chord changes or phrasings come when most of a song is already done.

While there are plug-ins that offer help with harmony, they are confined to an isolated window. They can't control your song as a whole. Your leeway to try different variants is severly limited. Some DAWs offer a chord track, but its capabilities are meh. Forcing static notes into a different chord simply doesn't cut it.

And last but not least, having to play everything yourself is not the most inspiring mode of operation. 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.

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.

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.