Aalto

Aalto is a carefully crafted box of sonic tools, few enough to learn easily, but flexible enough to combine in surprisingly powerful ways. Aalto can also be used as a reliable everyday tool, if this is what you are looking for.

Aalto, like many modular synthesizers, comes stocked with oscillators, filters, envelope generators, and goodies such as a waveshaper section and an especially nice one-knob reverb. Aalto's twist is that, thanks to the unique patching interface, making your own sounds with Aalto, even complicated ones, need not be a chore. One might even call it a joy.

Aalto is a sofware synthesizer plugin that comes in both VST and AU formats. A plugin does not run on its own. It needs a piece of application sofware, a host, to provide an environment in which to run. Sometimes hosts are also called DAWs, for Digital Audio Workstation.

Some good hosts include FL Studio and Ableton Live. These hosts provide easy ways to use synth plugins like Aalto.