Here's my first batch, which I'm looking forward to seeing in the first general release, and hearing what creators do with them.
A fat analog rolling bass, typical of the 1990s. For best results, run it through compression and value amplifier emulation. This demo also uses BR Jumpy for the brass after 03:36.
The famous brass riff. I couldn't resist! I've tuned it to have the same drift and oscillator variation, and there are other tweaks to make it leap out. For best results, give some EQ lift around 6 kHz and below 140 Hz (or amplify and do the inverse EQ, depending where in the frequency range you want to preserve phase).
A tine piano, expressive to velocity, good for accompaniments.
A closed-lid toy piano.
Square waves with a small pulse width.
This is a slow-moving pad of awesomeness. In collaboration with EvilDragon.
Noise through a resonant filter, sounding out those eddies that the wind makes over land and trees. Gently moving.
Find temporary demos at:
I'm cooking some patches for the upcoming 1.4 release, including:
I'm pleased with a new Grand Piano B that has low-end growl and high-end poise, and you can use it for classical renditions, accompaniment, or incidental lines. It includes stretch tuning and sympathetic resonance.
I also have C and D variants in reserve, in the hopes that creators will simply browse them to choose a piano. These names are unrelated to any other package of piano plugins.
I'm experimenting with section strings, focusing on a section violin first. In a production setup, you'd feed the same sequence to many instances of Surge XT with the patch loaded, the only difference between those instances is a controller that sets the 'unique instance' of the instrument. The rest is randomized and improvised in Surge.
Initial results are great, with a good return of investment in sections of 6 to 12. It has the characteristic lushness of a string section, while keeping the tight control of the earlier solo violin variant. You can use the controllers while playing, to control bow speed, bow force, play close to the bridge, call out open strings, express manual or automated vibrato, and bite into the strings when you need. It also plays inharmonic whispers if you play it quietly, to achieve that feeling of music emerging from breathing.
By default, it comes with tuning as perfect fifths so the open strings work intuitively, and you can switch that to ET2-12, or load up just intonation, or whatever suits your music.
For section controls, there's a slider to change the variation of players in the section, and if you roll your sleeves up, you can change the distribution of players on the sound stage.
Best of all, it's all open for you to edit in the synth, so you can tweak the tuning, air and body resonances, string properties, section controls, and more.