So what are the best plugins for house? The leads and pads are often layered sounds, so we need something with multiple oscillators.
Subtractive synthesis is the easiest to learn here. It works by stacking a bunch of waveforms on top of eachother, and then removing the frequencies we don’t want either through EQ or filtering.
Best synths for house music
Let’s look at some subtractive VST synths that produce excellent sound and have all the options that we need for house:
Sylenth1
The most popular synth for these types of sounds is Sylenth1, and for good reason. A major advantage you will have if you decide to pick up Sylenth is that there are LOADS of tutorials on youtube that will help you achieve a certain sound fairly quickly. Of course, your goal should be to learn the synth and create your own sounds, but we have a resource on that.
Nexus
Nexus is a bit of a weird synth. It’s not a VST in the traditional sense, but more like a soundbank that lets you turn a few knobs to tweak the sounds.
There are many soundbanks for different genres available for this synth, and the sounds and included effects are of stellar quality. These banks come pre-filled with some very key sounds that will take your production to the next level in seconds.
The major downside is that you can not do a whole lot of synthesis here. If the sound you’re looking for is not included, you will have to look elsewhere.