Sognevo has released Galdr, a free and open-source synthesizer built with a black metal soul, and it deserves a place in your rack regardless of the genre you make. The name comes from Old Norse, meaning a spell sung rather than spoken, which tells you plenty about the intent. This is a synth designed to conjure atmosphere, though its architecture is serious enough to earn a spot in any producer’s toolkit.
Under the hood sits a twelve-voice engine running poly, mono and legato modes, with two band-limited oscillators, up to seven-voice unison, a sub oscillator and noise. FM and hard sync handle the aggressive, metallic timbres, while a morphing wavetable mode sweeps from sine through saw to a deliberately inharmonic spectrum. The multimode filter covers low pass, high pass, band pass and vowel formant, each with drive and its own envelope. Modulation runs deep, with an eight-slot matrix routing LFOs, envelopes, velocity and per-note random to almost anything you fancy.
The effects chain is where the character lives, offering four flavours of distortion, bitcrusher, ring modulator, chorus, delay and a dark reverb with octave-up shimmer. A granular texture layer called Blizzard adds a continuous drone or gated snowstorm, and there is MPE support plus Scala microtuning for the adventurous.
It runs as VST3, CLAP, AU and standalone across Windows, macOS and Linux, licensed under GPLv3. Galdr is a genuinely capable instrument given away for nothing, and its darker leanings suit far more than metal.
Download here
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