FM synthesis has always had a bit of an image problem. Everybody loves the sound, but nobody wants to program it, which is why most of the FM you've heard in your life was a factory preset that nobody dared to touch. (Touching it was a fast way to turn an electric piano in to a fax machine.) With Sandbender, the four operators are where a sound starts. They're all here, in ten factory algorithms or any routing you feel like drawing, but every operator has a wave shaper of its own, there's a wavefolder, a sub oscillator, and six flavors of noise alongside them, and the whole lot runs through a proper filter and a low pass gate. If all you want is a nice FM bell, I'm happy to report that Sandbender makes a very nice FM bell. It just seems a shame to stop there.

We also tried to make the programming part less of a chore, since that was the whole problem in the first place. Modulation is drag-and-drop: grab a source off the rail (envelopes, LFOs, a couple of function generators, a step sequencer, the macros, and all the MIDI and MPE stuff) and drop it on pretty much any knob. And if you'd rather not program at all, nobody's going to blame you. The GENETICS page breeds new patches out of whatever you're playing, and PERFORM gives you two nodes to shove around the screen, plus a gesture recorder for when you stumble on something good. Six of our effects sit at the end of the chain, in whatever order you like, and there are 260-odd presets in the box to get you going.

Same as the rest of our catalog: Mac, Windows, Linux, and iOS. No DRM, no subscriptions, no dongles, perpetual license.

Platforms & Downloads

Fully functional demo. 20-minute session timer, save disabled.

Features

• Four-operator FM - Ten factory algorithms, plus an algorithm designer for drawing your own, and any operator can sound and modulate at the same time. Each operator tunes by harmonic ratio, free ratio, or fixed frequency, and Xmod, Regen, Detune, Spread, and a 32' to 2' Range work on the whole stack.
• Warp and Fold - A one-knob shaper on every operator morphs its wave from triangle through sine to pulse. The wavefolder, symmetric, asymmetric, or soft clip, works on what you hear and leaves the modulation alone, so it adds harmonics without rearranging the sidebands.
• Sub oscillator and noise - A divider sub clocked by operator 1, one octave down, two octaves down, or a two-octave pulse, with its own Warp. Six noise types, White, Pink, Velvet, Digital, Crackle, and Metal, each with Color and stereo Width.
• Eleven filter types - State-variable, ladder, diode, and Sallen-Key designs in low pass, high pass, and band pass, with resonance and Drive, running in stereo in every voice.
• Low pass gate - Each voice ends in a plain VCA or a modeled low pass gate, driven by the amp envelope. One gate mode stays close to clean, the other ties brightness to loudness for the pluck and the woody decay, and velocity closes either one.
• Envelopes and LFOs - Two ADSR envelopes per voice with attack and fall curve controls, one on the amplifier and one free for the matrix. Two LFOs, free or synced to host tempo, with delay and per-note retrigger.
• Function generators - Two per-voice function generators that rise and fall on a trigger, cycle as LFOs, or slew any source routed into them, with a gate output that goes high on the fall.
• Step sequencer - Sixteen steps, each a value and a gate, with length, direction (forward, reverse, pendulum, random), slew up to a second, and an internal clock, host sync, or a clock from any modulation source. It runs in every voice, restarting with each note or running free so the voices drift out of step.
• Drag-and-drop modulation - Every source sits on the modulation rail. Drag one onto a knob to route it, set a bipolar depth, and watch the knob move with it. Velocity, key tracking, mod wheel, pressure, pitch bend, and five assignable MIDI CCs are sources too.
• Four macros - Renameable macro knobs on the strip under every page, ready to drive anything in the patch and to automate from the host.
• GENETICS - A genetic preset generator. Choose which parts of the patch may change, from the operators and filter to the modulation and effects, and Sandbender grows a family tree of variants from the current sound. Click a node to hear it, double-click it to breed from there, and read what changed under the tree.
• PERFORM - Two nodes on a full-page touch surface, each axis aimed at a macro, a synth control, the filter, or an effect's mix. Play them with the mouse or with two fingers on a touch screen, and record a tempo-synced gesture loop of 1 to 8 bars that plays the movements back and saves with the preset.
• Six effects, in any order - Evil Otto multiband compression, Dubstation delay, ADverb with its Plate, Ambience, and Hall algorithms, Quatromod's flanger, chorus, diffusor, and frequency shifter, Kombinat's thirteen distortions, and the Phasetwo dual phaser. Drag the blocks to reorder the chain, and each has its own mix.
• MPE and microtuning - Full MPE, with per-note pitch bend, pressure, and slide on CC 74, and MTS-ESP microtuning that retunes each note at note-on or continuously.
• Eight voices - Poly, mono, or retriggered mono, with portamento, an output limiter, and 1x to 8x oversampling.
• Over 260 factory presets - Nine categories, Vintage FM, Basics, Bass, Keys, Pads, Dubstep, Ambient, MPE, and FX, in a browser with a 3D tag cloud that finds presets by tag and by author.

Frequently Asked Questions