Surge Synth Team Shortcircuit XT brings back Vembertech’s Shortcircuit sampler as an open-source, free plugin, and it’s now in beta.
Many years ago, more precisely in 2018, the open-source community took over Claes Johansen’s (aka Vembertech) Surge Synthesizer plugin. This led to the creation of the popular Surge XT synthesizer and the eponymous Surge Synth Team.
In 2021, they also took over Vembertech’s Shortcircuit2 sampler plugin. Now, the Surge Synth Team has revived the plugin and taken it further with the Shortcircuit XT. It’s free, open-source, and now in public beta for testing.
Surge Synth Team Shortcircuit XT
Shortcircuit XT is an open-source sampler plugin for macOS, Linux, and Windows, based on Vembertech Shortcircuit’s code.
The Surge Synth Team has taken many features from the ShortCircuit 2 sampler and completely revamped and added many new ones to ShortCircuit XT.
It’s a sampler plugin with a feature set on par with a commercial flagship sampler. It supports up to 16 parts, and each part can hold samples and multi-samples in formats such as WAV, AIFF, and SFZ.
You can easily import them via drag-and-drop. Alongside this, it features various synth engines, including a VA engine with various waveforms, PWM, and drift. You can now use it as a solo synth or in combination with the samples as a hybrid instrument.
A highlight of Shortcircuit XT is its vast array of sound manipulation options, which can be applied to individual sounds or the entire patch. You can find audio rate modulators (FM, phase mod…), filters, distortions, delays, resonators, and more.
There are also various ways to route the individual sounds and parts. Yes, a truly sound design machine. The same applies to the built-in modulation, which is also super powerful.
You can access up to five envelopes, four LFOs, four group LFOs, macros, MPE, phasors, randomizers, and more. A sophisticated modulation matrix manages all modulator-to-destination mappings. It also offers an impressive range of possibilities.
Further, you can find a mixing console page where you can mix the individual sounds of your multi-patch perfectly. To refine your sounds, each channel has four AUX ins for routing in up to four effects.
The global (AUX) section doesn’t contain the same number of effects as the main section, but the number is still solid: reverb, delay, flanger, phaser, and more.
First Impression
This is a brief overview of what Shortcircuit XT can do. The plugin is capable of much more, and it would take many pages to list everything it integrates with.
As with Surge XT, the feature set is far from complete and will likely continue to grow over time. I hope that features like granular synthesis will be added eventually in the future. It’s already an impressive release, and I’m looking forward to the official release.
Surge Synth Team Shortcircuit XT is available now as a free public beta download. It runs as a VST3, AU, and CLAP plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows.
More information here: GitHub
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