Ronan Fed offers PNEUMA, a FREE subtractive polyphonic synth for Windows.
As far as freebies go, this one looks pretty stacked with features, and I can appreciate the work that goes into putting something like PNEUMA together.
The well-presented GUI doesn’t look too dissimilar from many paid poly synth plugins; it’s probably even better than some.
Getting into the features starts with four multi-voice oscillators offering eight voices, with Detune and Stereo. The oscillators are grouped as oscillators one and three, then oscillators two and four at the top of the interface.
Below the first oscillators is another Noise oscillator along with two Sample oscillators. The Noise oscillator offers Stereo with Filter and Amp envelopes, and the Sample oscillators offer four voices with Detune and Stereo.
Next is the Filter section with two filter types: State Variable and Moog, and it has an ADSR filter envelope with curve controls.
Completing the top half of the GUI is the Effects section, featuring an Arpeggiator, Parametric EQ, Phaser, Chorus, Delay, Reverb, and Compressor. What I’ve heard of PNEUMA so far sounds like it would be a great synth for a wide range of EDM and Techno music. It seems like it has the chops for everything from Minimal Techno grooves to euphoric Trance and old-school Rave. The built-in Arpeggiator could be an excellent tool when making any of those styles of music.
A demo video showcases some Trance arpeggios, and some of them made me wish I was at a festival, so I guess that means they are pretty good.
The lower half of the GUI starts with an Amp envelope, followed by two LFOs, two ADSR Modulation envelopes, and a Modulation Matrix with two sources and four destinations.
It even has a Chords Generator, which can be very useful when creating repetitive patterns for the abovementioned genres.
Once you get to the Output section, you’ll find another couple of effects to play with, including Distortion, Saturation, Stereo Imaging, and Bass Boost.
So, yeah, it’s pretty stacked for a freebie without going into great detail.
It also has a bunch of presets, and one that I liked was BS Verba: it seems like it could be a versatile starting point.
While on the topic of free synths, check out Wave Manuel from new developer Pauli Pölkki.
PNEUMA is available in VST2/VST3 formats for Windows 8/10/11.
UPDATE: Ronan Fed’s plugins are no longer available. You can get more information on KVR Audio.
Download: PNEUMA
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15 Comments
MARCOS UBIRAJARA PROKOP
onmuito bom, no brasil não t43m nem um incentivo.
MRG
onVrei să pleci dar pneumă, pneumă iei. The 00s called, they want their classic trance plugin back.
Classic, or is it vintage at this point? Let’s go with classic. Classic sound, classic user experience, classic presets. This is just a pure classic synth, with almost everything you would find on those 00s classic plugins and perhaps a bit more.
Bonus points for having a saw AND a ramp. Love that.
Bug? The Sample Osc doesn’t obey the AMP release. I’m on Win7 64bit if that matters. Tested with CLASSIC!! Adventure Kid single-cycle WAVs.
ZKM
onBug? The Sample Osc doesn’t obey the AMP release.
It works with longer wav samples, not with short looped samples.
MRG
onWell, it sorta does. But doesn’t. The Advance Kid samples kinda load, they cycle, badly? Plus it has that D2+2 thing (in short, it’s detuned). Anyway, it would be nice if that would work better, and not cut short while you release a note. That said, even without that feature, this is a really nice synth. I’ll play with longer samples later.
T
onThis synth was already released 9 month ago. Nothing new. Since much better platforms such as Vital have been released.
Fred
onAre you saying this does actually work with Win 7 64 Bit ? it only says Win 10/11 min (did anyone actually use 8 !!).
I really hope so, like many many of us with small studios, WE STILL USE Win 7 because it just works ! and many of our legacy plugins that we use and love don’t work with Win 10.
I have Win 10 on my laptop, and I hate it. It does NOTHING that win 7 can’t do, and the user interface is awful. As far Ias I can see it’s just designed to try every trick to get you subscribed to Microsoft’s main pay packages (office/cortana etc.), and that’s about it.
MRG
onSame here, a laptop on 10 I don’t use for audio at all (no particular reason, tho) and an ‘old’ tower on 7. So, yes, it seems to work on 7. So far. Devs will refrain from saying 7 is supported, as the OS is unsupported by MicroSoft itself. And also they might not want to keep an old machine to try everything all the time, understandably. If 8 is supported, you should try on 7 because these OSes are very similar. 10/11 might have more differences so, YMMV (different APIs for system functions, mainly).
Numanoid
onExcellent synth, I predict it will become among the top 10 best free of 2022. Starting with the init patch a couple of tweaks of the oscillators and chord and stereo mode, quickly deliver usable results, and that is just scratching the surface what it can do. CPU load is low, installation is easy. The only thing I am missing is a way to scale the GUI, I would want a bigger interface.
MRG
onResizable GUI would be very welcomed, indeed. o_o -_- O_O
Wing Yee
on@ Numanoid Agreed…this is an excellent sounding synth.
ilias
onfrom now on every time you adjust your expensive synths for concrete traditional sound design you gonna think of how successful this implementation is. i hope it sounds as it should cause i can’t listen properly atm, but as tightness of implementation it tingles close to when i first got vanguard…
ilias
onrevisiting excited comment after studio listen, good implementation of out saturation… this focker is a diamond…
JEP1928
onSylenth1 Killer? probably.
Miguel Pacheco
onSo since things don’t seem to change in the long run, which other similar synth could you recommend to use in place of this one?
Thanks a lot!
rek
onRonan Fed is a promising new developer. If you’re reading, please keep going! Also please test your plugins in Linux using Yabridge, there’s some GUI glitching problems that I haven’t seen on any other plugins.