Hydra: the hybrid synth VST that talks

A hybrid synth VST built for bass that talks

Hydra is a hybrid synthesizer plugin: wavetable and FM oscillators, a formant "mouth" inside every voice and per-voice distortion, in one window. It plays chords, leads and pads like any synth, but it was built around the sound producers chase the most: basses that growl, yoi and talk.

In most synths a talking bass is a project. You load a formant filter, draw LFO shapes for its vowel position, sync them to the beat and tweak until the words come through. In Hydra you type the word.

Speak: type a word, hear it in time with your track

Type YOI, WOW, YEAH or RAAH into the Speak box. Hydra turns the letters into up to eight vowel steps on a U · O · A · E · I scale and walks every voice's mouth through them. On Sync the steps follow your DAW's tempo, from 1/32 notes to 2 bars per step. On Per note each new note says the word from the start, which is how one-shot growls and yoi stabs are made.

• Steps sets how many vowels the word has, and each step can be dragged up or down to bend the word.
• Slur decides how the mouth moves between steps: low values snap like a riddim wub, high values slide like a lazy "wow".
• Size changes the mouth: left is small and nasal, right is a giant throat that makes the same word sound bigger and darker.
• Mouth Focus sharpens the vowel resonances so the words cut through a busy drop.

Three heads: Bite, Mouth and Rage

Eight wavetable families ship inside the plugin: Classic, Growl, Vocal, Metal, Hollow, Digital, Reese and Sub. Morph scans through each one, so a single knob takes a sound from round to snarling. Bite adds a sine operator that frequency-modulates the table for metallic and FM tones, and Warp bends, syncs or mirrors the waveform's cycle.

Because Rage runs per voice, a chord through Fuzz stays a chord instead of turning into mud. Put Rage before the mouth for clear words, or after it when you want the vowels themselves to break up.

Easy on the first day, deep when you want it

The main view is the three heads and eight big knobs: Morph, Bite, Speak Rate, Size, Drive, Cutoff, Wobble and Space. Every preset sets them to what matters for that sound, so you can shape a patch without opening a menu. Mutate nudges the current preset into a close variation when you want the next bassline to be slightly different, and the dice goes further.

Underneath there's a 24 dB low-pass filter with its own envelope amount, an amp envelope and a mod envelope that can move Morph, the vowel and the cutoff, and Wobble, a tempo-synced LFO with five shapes that can move the cutoff, vowel, morph, bite, drive or volume. Poly, Mono and Legato modes with glide cover chords, basses and 808 slides.

A bass VST for dubstep, tearout, trap and house

Hydra vs Serum, Vital and Pigments

Serum, Vital and Pigments are excellent synths and much deeper modulation labs than Hydra. Where Hydra is different is the mouth: a formant filter in every voice and a word-driven sequencer for it, so vocal basses are the default rather than an advanced trick. It is also a one-time €69, with no subscription and no rent-to-own, and you can play every preset on this page before you buy.

Play it in your browser with a MIDI keyboard

The synth above is the real Hydra engine, compiled for the web. Play it with your computer keyboard (A to L for notes, Z and X for octaves) or plug in a USB MIDI keyboard: in Chrome and Edge, Hydra responds to velocity, pitch bend, the mod wheel, the sustain pedal and aftertouch. In your DAW it's a VST3, AU or AAX instrument for macOS and Windows.