Surge XT
More info
- Creator
- Claes Johanson (Vember Audio)
- Released
- 2005 (open-sourced 2018)
- Type
- Software synthesizer
- License
- GPL 3
- Website
- surge-synthesizer.github.io
A commercial Swedish synth that went open source and then grew faster as a community project than it ever had as a product.
Claes Johanson built Surge under the Vember Audio name and sold it as a VST synth from the mid-2000s. It was a hybrid: classic subtractive synthesis with wavetable and FM oscillators, two filter blocks and generous modulation. In 2018 Johanson released the code under GPL 3 — rare for a commercial synth, and all the more welcome for it.
A volunteer group, the Surge Synth Team, took over, ported the code to JUCE and shipped it as Surge XT in 2021. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and was an early adopter of the open CLAP plugin format. Its niche strength is microtuning: it loads custom tuning files, which makes it popular with people who consider twelve notes per octave a convention rather than a law of nature.