Synth Engines

A sample of synth engines and effects available in Zynthian, for a longer list see below...

1 Engine Guides

1.1 Zynthian Native Engines

1.2 Supported Synth Engines

2 LV2 Plugins: Synths & Effects

2.1 Synths

Category Sub-category Bypass Stereo Control Pages Notes


  • Dexed (Yamaha DX7 emulation)
  • MDA plugins (LV2 port of MDA plugin collection, including ePiano, JX10, DX10 and others)
  • TAL free plugins (Some plugins from Togu Audio Line, including Noize M4k3r and more)
  • DISTRHO Plugins-Ports (A collection of plugins ported to Linux that includes OBXd and others)
  • DISTRHO DPF-Plugins (A plugin collection which includes the Nekobi Bass Monosynth and more)
  • Calf plugins (One of the best free software plugin collection)
  • Helm (Advanced Polyphonic Synthesizer + Arpeggiator)
  • AMSynth (Analog Modelling Synthesizer)
  • Synthv1 (Old School Polyphonic Synthesizer)
  • Padthv1 (Old School Polyphonic Additive Synthesizer)
  • SooperLooper Live looping sampler capable of immediate loop recording, overdubbing,
  • Surge Free & Open source hybrid synthesizer...
  • DrumGizmo: Open source, multichannel, multilayered, drum plugin - User Guide
  • GeonKick: is a free software for generating a wide range of percussive sounds - User Guide
  • And much more ...

2.2 Effects

All kind of effects:

Category Includes
Delay Delay, Echo
Distortion Overdrive, Distortion, Fuzz, Wave-shaper
Dynamics Compressor, Limiter
Filter Filter, Equalizer, (Auto-)Wah, Envelope Filter
Generator Synthesizer, Piano, Organ, Drums, Noise, SoundFonts
Modulator Chorus, Phaser, Flanger, Vibrato, Tremolo, Ring modulator
Reverb Reverb, Shimmer, Plate, Room, Spring
Simulator Amplifier, Cabinet, Leslie, Tube
Spatial Panner, Auto-panner, Stereo field manipulator
Spectral Pitch-shifter, Auto-tune, Harmonizer, Vocoder
Granular Granulator
MIDI utilities MIDI filter & tools
Other Arppeggiator, SooperLooper


This is not a complete list of all synths & effect plugins, see the MOD devices wiki page to see some amp and cabinet sim plugins available:

Details about each of the MOD plugins

3 Supported plugin types

Currently, Zynthian supports only LV2 plugins compiled for RBPi (ARM):

Here is an unmaintained repository of LV2-plugins for Zynthian: https://github.com/zynthian/zynthian-plugins/tree/master/lv2

Support for VST, DSSI and LADSPA has been removed for simplicity, but it could be re-enabled in the future if we have good reasons for doing so.