A six-voice synth where the knobs are part of the performance. Switch on Bend, turn a knob, and Scythe records the move and plays it back when you play.
$4.99, one purchase, with Family Sharing. Requires iPadOS 26; also runs on Apple silicon Macs.
Bend
Most synths make you wire an LFO or a mod matrix to get a sound moving. In Scythe you just move it. Bend records the gesture itself, timing and all, and turns it into modulation.
One button puts every knob on the panel into record.
Sweep the cutoff, drag the pitch, push the ring mod. If no note is held, Scythe plays the last one so you can hear the move as you make it.
The move is saved with the patch and plays back from the top whenever you start playing from silence. Knobs carrying a bend light up; turn one normally to clear it.
The engine
Each of the six voices runs two wavetable oscillators with sine, triangle, saw, and square plus five digital waves, a crossfade between them, ring modulation, and pulse width. Behind them sit a low-, high-, or band-pass filter with drive, two envelopes, and two LFOs.
Effects
Redux crushes the bits and sample rate, then the sound runs through phaser, chorus, and delay. Random leaves the effects alone, so the room around a patch holds steady while you roll new ones.
Clips
Hit Record and Scythe captures what you play as a WAV file, with the silence trimmed from both ends. Play clips back, copy one to paste into another app, or share it.
Presets
Nineteen factory patches to learn from and a user bank for your own. Or press Random and let Scythe roll a whole new patch; the reviews are right that it is hard to stop.
Inside
Everything in the app, and all of it in the plug-in too.
Sound demos
No added effects or processing. Just the instrument, straight from the iPad. The playlist still carries Scythe’s original working title, GrainBender.
Reviews
4.6 out of 5 from 133 ratings on the US App Store
★★★★★
The bend modulation record function alone is worth the price of admission. Very novel way to mod and easier to set up than LFO’s or mod matrix’s.
★★★★★
The bending feature is what makes this synth stand out and you can also midi bend other iOS synths with this.
★★★★★
Awesome sound, insanely fast sound design!
★★★★★
This app is the most totally anarchic fun you can have without it being illegal!
★★★★★
The sounds that this thing can create are so wild. I just can't stop pushing the dice button!!!
★★★★★
Definitely one of the very top 5 synths in the AppStore
Try it today
$4.99 once on the App Store, with Family Sharing. The app and the AUv3 plug-in come together.
