Whispers, rumours, leaks. Like the crescendo of a filter sweep, the return of Absynth – the iconic software instrument that helped define the sound of early 00’s electronic music – has reached fever pitch in the lead-up to its unexpected rebirth. Behind the scenes at Native Instruments, the energy has been no less frenetic.
“Maximum crunch, constant panic” is how Brian Clevinger, Absynth’s creator and founder of Rhizomatic described the final pre-release push.
Speaking to MusicRadar mere days before the launch of Absynth 6, Clevinger seems keenly aware of the high expectations he and the development team are expected to meet.
You see, Absynth isn’t just any soft synth. Its sea-green colour scheme and idiosyncratic architecture is something that a generation of sound designers and synthesists have grown up with.
And this isn’t just a new version: it’s a full-blown resurrection.
Arriving two years after the product was discontinued by Native Instruments, and 16 long… long years since the release of Absynth 5.
Now sporting MPE capabilities, newly designed filters, a slickly upgraded UI, a trippy new spatial method of navigating presets, and all the sonic firepower long-time fans could ask for, this 2025 iteration of Absynth has, thankfully, been worth the wait.
Back in the year 2000, when Clevinger released version 1 as ‘shareware’ (what we might now describe as a freebie) he had no idea how large the impact would be.
“I didn't think anybody would be into it,” he admits. “But I was just inundated with responses. People were really excited about it, it was kind of an instant hit.”
Looking back, it’s easy to see why. VSTs were still toddlers, having only been invented four years previously. The very premise that you could work with computer-generated sound, rather than triggered audio samples, was still fresh, and the available instruments were mostly rudimentary emulations of pianos and Minimoogs.
“The whole concept of a software synth hadn't sunk in yet,” Clevinger says of that time. “The idea that you play a note on your keyboard and the sound comes out of your computer was a weird idea for most people.”
In that context, Absynth, much like the potent beverage from which it takes its name, was a mind-melting experience. Its three-channel lanes and swappable modules could combine multiple types of synthesis and audio processing simultaneously.
Equipped with a waveform editor, it allowed users to draw custom shapes before applying additional algorithmic transformations, including the now-iconic ‘Fractalize’ function which added new harmonics by recursively pushing a waveform back into itself.
Its approach to modulation, which put user-defined, multi-stage envelopes front and centre, was, and still is, a remarkable contrast to the dominant paradigm of LFOs.
Perhaps most importantly of all, it took all of those powerful sound–shaping tools and made them comparatively easy to experiment and play with. It’s little wonder that Absynth was snapped up by Native Instruments a year later, becoming one of the company’s flagship products from 2001 all the way up to 2023.
All that innovation is made even more impressive by the fact that Clevinger’s skills as a software developer were entirely self-taught. Rather than a formal study of computer science, his pathway to Absynth was guided by a life-long fascination with the inner workings of audio.
“I was just always really interested in sound,” he recalls. “With certain sounds, it was kind of an emotional thing. When I was a little kid there was this big drain pipe with three smaller pipes at the back, we'd go in there, clap our hands, and it would make this just incredible comb-filter kind of sound. I wish I could hear it today.”
That ear for the unusual eventually led Clevinger to study music composition at university, where he first got his hands on classic hardware like the ARP 2500.
“This was in the early ‘80s,” he recalls. “It was just before MIDI and I was still working on analogue systems, but, at the same time, I was hearing examples of the computer-generated music that was happening at IRCAM. They were doing stuff I really wanted to do myself, but it was just completely inaccessible.”
Early musical programming environments like Max/MSP and Supercollider offered Clevinger the experimental sonics he was interested in, but lacked the intuitive accessibility of a musical instrument.
That tension stayed with him and, as computer power increased and real-time digital synthesis became possible in the mid-90’s, he began teaching himself DSP programming with aspirations to bridge the divide.
“The soft synths that were available were pretty limited,” he says. “It was either really simplistic things that didn't sound great or super complex modular environments. So I thought Absynth could be a sweet spot in-between.”
While he knew where he was aiming, Clevinger makes clear that Absynth was definitely not the result of some master plan.
What began as 'crappy little oscillators and really crappy little low-pass filters' were steadily refined and linked together, eventually coalescing into the foundations of Absynth’s first version.
“It just came out of whatever experiments I was doing at the time,” Clevinger says simply. “I mean the whole setup with three channels happened pretty early and I was originally thinking of it as a temporary solution till I figured out how to make it more modular, but after working with it I really liked it. Things just evolved until they got to the point where it felt right.”
"I wanted it to be like going on a journey, instead of just jumping around between random sounds"
Absynth broke new ground upon its release, and continued to do so over the following years: V2 introduced sample playback and granular synthesis; Absynth 3 added surround sound output, even though, as Clevinger laughingly admits, almost no one had multi-channel setups at the time; the fourth iteration brought vastly improved preset browsing and assignable macros, and the fifth instalment introduced Mutation.
It’s worth pausing to appreciate the genius of Absynth’s Mutation feature. Using tags for instrument type, articulation, genre, and more, users could define a narrow list of presets before hitting the Mutate button. This would then pull random parameters from those presets and combine them with whatever sound you were currently working on.
Not only that, but you could define how much randomisation should occur, how far from the original sound you wanted to deviate, and even lock down specific modules to exclude them from the mutation process.
A dedicated Mutation History window would save each new variation, allowing you to build up a library of related sounds at lightning-fast speed. It’s a feature that is still impressive in 2025, but at the time of its release in 2009, it was inspired.
“People kept asking for a randomiser,” Clevinger says of Mutation’s origin. “But if you just start randomising the parameters it gets very complicated because each preset can have a completely different set of modules. I wanted to do it in a meaningful way, where the musician could guide that random process somehow.
“I was looking at the preset list,” he continues. “And thinking about how you can select just bass sounds, and it'll only show you bass. I thought if you could pick one of those related presets, grab little bits from it, insert it into the preset you're working on, and then add some randomisation, that would be the key. I wanted it to be like going on a journey, instead of just jumping around between random sounds.”
Version 5 was a triumph, but it was also the point at which Absynth began to languish. Development slowed, and after growing increasingly long in the tooth the instrument was eventually discontinued in 2023, much to the dismay of longtime users.
For just about any other soft synth, that would have been the end of the story. But the remarkable longevity of this instrument, its sheer uniqueness and its undeniable musical prowess ensured that, even once it was gone, it was not forgotten. “I had no idea that so many people were still using it, to tell you the truth,” admits Clevinger when asked about the community response to news of Absynth’s demise. “But I just got tons, and tons, and tons of messages from people begging me to bring it back somehow.”
Those pleas have now been answered. Working closely with the Native Instruments' team, a process that Clevinger unreservedly describes as 'fantastic', Absynth is back for a sixth outing and is looking better than ever.
“We have really been focusing on the user interface,” emphasises Clevinger. “Because nobody's ever been happy with Absynth's UI. It’s a super complex thing to get right, and involves endless discussions to try and work out the problems, but I'm really thrilled with what we've got now; it's so much better than what we had before and the design team's been great.”
For Clevinger, the top priorities during the development process were ensuring backward compatibility with legacy presets (presets from versions 4 and 5 are compatible with Absynth 6) and that the original audio engine was retained – a section of code that Clevinger says he touches 'as little as possible.'
But it wasn't all about preservation: significant improvements have been made to Absynth's granular synthesis chops.
“All of that stuff is much denser than it was previously,” states Clevinger. “We’ve added a high density mode, and the Aetherizer and the Cloud filters sound much closer to what I originally wanted.”
One of the most striking new UI elements is the Preset Explorer that greets you when you first load up Absynth 6. A dizzying array of presets, dating back over two decades, are rendered as a multi-coloured point-cloud that you can click through and navigate as you might a geographical map.
Working with Eno was something of a full-circle moment for Clevinger, who was inspired by Eno’s looping techniques when designing the Absynth's first version
Native Instruments tasked a number of artists with designing custom presets for Absynth 6, including none other than synthesis pioneer Brian Eno himself.
Working with Eno was something of a full-circle moment for Clevinger, who was inspired by Eno’s looping techniques when designing the envelopes for the original Absynth plugin.
That’s not all. Using deep learning techniques, Native Instruments’ Applied AI team trained a model on Absynth’s entire back catalogue of presets, allowing them to be spatially grouped by sonic characteristics. The goal is to help users break past the preset-paralysis that so often arises when scrolling through endless walls of text.
“I don't think there's anything musical about a list of presets,” says Andy Sarroff, head of Applied AI at Native Instruments, and himself a former mix and mastering engineer. “There’s something inherently uninspiring about staring down thousands of names and tags when you're trying to create. So, how do we solve that problem? There's never gonna be any perfect solution, but being able to visualise and explore this huge universe of sounds in a spatial way will hopefully either help you find what you want quickly, or be inspired by adjacent sounds.”
Of course, Absynth still has a more traditional preset browser system that you can switch to if you prefer, and Sarroff makes clear that accommodating different working styles is a top priority. “It's always a balancing act for us,” he points out. “We’re trying to figure out how to do this in a way that helps people feel like they're having fun, and not that they're being talked down to in any kind of way.”
Alongside all of that there is the inclusion of MPE and polyphonic aftertouch, something that’s sure to excite performers who want to feel the maximum amount of nuance and expression from the instrument.
However, for Clevinger, it wasn’t this that caught his finely-tuned ear; his favourite new addition is a humble filter.
“I really like the new ladder notch filter,” he says, confiding that he unconsciously drew some inspiration from one the first synths he ever used, the ARP 2500, during its design. “My favourite thing on the ARP 2500 was this multi-mode filter that had a notch mode – and I certainly did not try to emulate it or anything, but that was the sound I had in my head. The notch filter mode, that's my favourite.”
It’s an attitude that seems emblematic of Absynth’s quarter-century run: bedrock features and idiosyncratic innovation, a workhorse and a dream machine, the essentials and the esoteric, all blended together to serve up a truly intoxicating sonic concoction.
As fans look ahead to the next 25 years, they can feel assured that Absynth has lost none of its potency, or its relevance, least of all to Clevinger himself.
“It's been a real emotional thing bringing this back,” he reflects. “This is the best project I've ever worked on.”
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