Clean oscillators
Sine, triangle, and band-limited saw and square that keep the digital fizz out of the high notes. Three per voice, sixteen voices.
Polyphonic synthesizer · macOS
Analog soul.
Digital body.
SONORA is a synthesizer built from scratch — every oscillator, filter and envelope written by hand, behind an interface drawn by hand, with every control in reach. Made for one thing above all: to be played live.
16
Voices
3 + 1
Oscillators + noise
2
Multimode filters
1
Window, no pages
143
Factory presets
01 · Sound
The warmth of analog,
written line by line.
No framework, no borrowed engine, no samples. SONORA's sound is its own code, from the first oscillator cycle to the last reverb tail — shaped to behave the way analog circuits do: wide, a little unruly, and never harsh.
Unison that breathes
Up to five detuned copies per oscillator, spread across the stereo field — the thick, drifting chorus of an old polysynth.
Filters you can sweep
Two state-variable filters in parallel — lowpass to allpass — stable however hard and fast you turn the cutoff, each with its own envelope.
Noise, white or pink
A noise source in every voice for breath, air and percussion, routed to either filter.
Soft saturation
The mix rounds off in a smooth soft clip before the effects, so a dense chord pushed hard gets warmer, not broken.
Movement everywhere
Four envelopes per voice, two tempo-synced LFOs, and a sixteen-slot matrix routing them to pitch, level, pan, cutoff or resonance.
Factory sounds
143 presets,
voiced by Re:Axis.
Every factory sound was built by the artist Re:Axis, on SONORA itself: pads, basses, leads, keys, choirs, arpeggios, rhythms, drums and effects, ready to play the moment the app opens — and each one a starting point to pull apart.
I wanted every sound to feel like it was patched on an old poly late at night — a little unstable, a little warm, alive under your hands. On SONORA nothing got between the idea and the sound: everything I needed was right there on the panel.
Re:Axis
Sound designer, SONORA's factory presets ·
Listen on Bandcamp ↗
02 · Interface
Hand-crafted.
Everything at hand.
Every knob, meter, waveform and envelope display is drawn by SONORA's own design system, made for this instrument. The whole instrument lives on one panel: no pages to flip, no menus to dig through. The control you want is always where your hand expects it.
- Oscillators, filters and envelopes draw what they are doing as you turn them.
- The modulation matrix, envelopes and LFOs share one tabbed strip in the middle of the panel.
- A voice and DSP-load readout in the top bar, amber at 70 %, red at 90 %.
Set up in a minute
Pick an output, pick a MIDI source, and play. Any knob can be learned to any controller, and the map saves itself as you go. One click on Panic silences every voice.
03 · Live
Built to be played,
not programmed.
A scale under your fingers
Choose a key and a scale in the top bar and the keybed lights up every note that belongs to it — major, minor, the seven modes, pentatonics, blues, whole tone. Improvise without a wrong note in sight.
A realtime-safe engine
The audio thread never allocates, locks or waits on anything, so nothing you do on the panel can stall the sound.
Arpeggiator with latch
Up, down, as played, random or chords over four octaves, with gate and swing — latch it, take your hands off, and ride the filter.
Glide and wheels
Polyphonic glide, always or legato only, plus pitch-bend and mod wheels that answer both the mouse and your controller.
One tempo for all
LFOs, arpeggiator and delay lock to one clock from 20 to 300 BPM, at any division from 1/32 to four bars.
No clicks when stealing
Play past sixteen notes and the voice that gives way fades out over 2 ms — you hear the new note, never a pop.
Play from anywhere
A MIDI keyboard, the mouse on the on-screen keybed, or your computer's keys — 143 presets ready the moment it opens.
Requirements
Made for the Mac.
Native on Apple Silicon and Intel, with nothing else to install. Uninstalling is dragging the app to the Trash.
- Operating system
- macOS 12 Monterey or later
- Processor
- Universal binary — Apple Silicon and Intel
- Audio
- Any CoreAudio output device, at the device's own sample rate
- MIDI
- Optional — any CoreMIDI keyboard or controller, with velocity, sustain, pitch bend and mod wheel
- Play without a controller
- A three-octave keybed for the mouse or the computer keyboard
- Formats
- Standalone app · VST3 and Audio Unit beta
Be first to play it
Join the waiting list and we'll email you once, when SONORA is ready.