Synfire
Experience a groundbreaking new technology that is able to understand and interpret music at a high level of abstraction. Following an entirely new approach, Synfire helps you develop new ideas and put them to life.
Create unique harmonic progressions, intricate instrumental parts, driving rhythms and striking musical expressions with ease. Change harmony, structure, interpretation and instrumentation at any time and watch your music transform immediately. Reuse fragments of previous works and combine them in new ways. Discover a workflow that continually suggests new approaches that you can hear and evaluate immediately. Your work evolves with every new idea that comes to your mind. Happy accidents and inspiring surprises abound.
Your next hook line or leitmotif may be just around the corner.
Discover Music Prototyping today and boost your productivity and fun.
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Music Prototyping
In order to do something useful with your gear, you already need a pretty concrete idea of the stuff you want to record and arrange, because a DAW is basically just a recording device. The longer you work on a project, the more difficult it becomes to make sweeping changes, because everything is static. More often than not, you find yourself at a point where you settle for a mediocre compromise because starting over would be too tedious.
That's a shame, because you are falling short of your creative potential.
The idea behind Music Prototyping is to render music from parameters, phrases and harmony, much like CGI renders pictures from wire frames, textures and lighting. You can edit or replace all parameters at any time, no matter how advanced your project already is. For example, if you replace the Harmony parameter, you will immediately hear your music tell a different narrative.
Phrases are the context-sensitive and reusable building blocks of Synfire. You create and edit them in many ways and collect them in libraries. These libraries are your personal repertoire for compsing music. Throw a phrase into an arrangement and it will unfold in ever new and surprising ways.
What Synfire Can Do
- Draw, edit, import, generate, collect and combine reusable phrases in countless ways.
- Make looped phrases develop variations over time.
- Move sections around while instruments adapt to the new surroundings.
- Move phrases to different instruments while they transform to match their pitch range.
- Generate thousands of phrases that sound natural and make sense (Pro).
- Morph phrases by smoothly blending one into another (Pro).
- Attach articulations to any musical fragment (Pro).
- Export your finished work to a DAW for production.
- Compose music around existing tracks in a DAW that's synchronized with Synfire (e.g. vocals).
What It Means For You
- Sketch and transform melodic shapes intuitively.
- Rearrange your score with broad strokes and let Synfire figure out the details.
- Get results so fast that you can judge them more objectively.
- Grab musical expressions from your previous works and insert them into new ones.
- Like any memorable motif, a single phrase can be the starting point and inspiration for an entire project.
- Master all the different instrumental parts that breathe life into your music.
- Discover musical styles beyond your routine and habits.
- Be inspired by happy accidents and surprises.
- Intuitively learn the theory of music.
- Escape writer’s block.
Your Intelligent Sidekick
Synfire doesn't want to replace your DAW or notation program. It is meant to complement them. Synfire is a standalone application that hosts and controls your virtual instruments (AudioUnits, VST3, VST). You can export your results to a DAW with drag & drop, or export Standard MIDI Files (SMF). Or write notation formats like MusicXML and LilyPond.
Inspiration For Years To Come
Synfire is an inexhaustible source of new ideas. Users that have worked with Synfire for a while can't imagine what they would do without it.
Some popular music apps are custom-tailored to a specific style of music and put an emphasis on entertainment and instant gratification. They are fun to use, but the music pretty much sounds all the same. Synfire is not hard-wired to a specific style and workflow. It is an extremely deep and powerful tool. We could have flattened the learning curve by baking in a lot of assumptions about workflow and style, but we didn't want to do that at the expense of creative freedom.
With us, you're supported by artificial intelligence on an equal footing, instead of being at its mercy. You retain full control and the freedom for spontaneous suggestions. In the end, you've actually created something yourself that no one else could have created.
Take your time to make yourself familiar with it and you will be rewarded handsomely.
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Human-Like Phrase Synthesis
Synfire Pro Factories do not make any assumptions about genre or style. Their internal rules are universal and the range of expression is vast. You will never get clichés or stereotypes, except by pure chance. If you want standards like reggae, boogie, or bossa nova, you'll probably get results faster with an auto-accompaniment arranger keyboard. If you want striking and memorable expressions as building blocks for your work, use Synfire. Here is a medley of generated phrases (that happened to fall into many different styles).
Quick Mockups
Synfire is particularly good at assisting with harmony, melody, and structure. That makes it well suited for orchestral mockups. This arrangement was assembled from phrases and smaller fragments from a library. It was mostly a matter of drag and drop.
Harmony Is a Parameter
Since harmony is a parameter, it can be replaced at any time. Sometimes this radically alters the mood and narrative of a score. Below are two variants of a more elaborate piece. Nothing demonstrates the dynamism of music prototyping as impressively as replacing harmony: Dropping a progression from a library was all that was needed to get from the first track to the second track.
Polishing a result in the DAW is far easier than doing all the composing by hand. But most importantly, you can quickly try different prototypes and decide where you want to go.
Works With All Genres
Not into orchestral music? Like a DAW, Synfire is open to all genres and styles. Its algorithms and AI are based on the universal principles of music. It is not hardwired to anything. In fact, prototyping and arranging other genres is pretty easy. Check out a few examples we have done for testing Synfire's features here.
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.