Software & Plugins

What Is Spektral?

OCTOBER 10, 2026

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There are so many incredible synths out there, like Serum, Vital, Phase Plant, Harmor, and a whole bunch of others, that have made it possible to do things with sound that would have been completely impractical a few decades ago. But I kept feeling like there was another way of working with sound that hadn’t really been explored in the way that I wanted. And after 2 years of experimenting, exploring different ideas, and slowly adding more and more features, it eventually became Spektral.


I am calling Spektral a ‘spectral synth’, but that doesn’t really explain what it does. The initial goal of Spektral was to find a solution to the problem that many additive synths face: how do you interact with hundreds of individual sine waves without exposing hundreds of individual parameters? While trying to find an answer to this question, I realized you could take this beyond just an additive synth. I eventually added several more synthesis methods that use this same concept of interfacing with hundreds of little parameters: resonators, band-pass filters, and even granular synthesis. So how does Spektral answer this question? Well, that’s where the ‘spectral tables’ come in.

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"You can literally open up Paint and draw an image to describe the sound you want. Or drag an existing audio sample into Spektral and have it turn that sound into spectral information."

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What Is a Spectral Table?

You can think of a spectral table pretty much like an image, where each pixel kind of acts like a little parameter. Let’s compare it to a wavetable for a second, a normal wavetable contains a bunch of slices, waveforms, that you can scan through. A spectral table instead contains a bunch of slices of ‘spectral’ information. It takes one of these vertical slices from that table and uses it to control different parts of the sound. For example, one of those slices could describe the levels of the hundreds of sine waves in the additive engine. And this is where it starts to get really fun. You can literally open up paint and draw an image to describe the sound you want. Or you can drag an existing audio sample into Spektral and have it turn that sound into spectral information.

It doesn’t just end at the level either. You can have it influence phase and frequency as well. And the other algorithms expose even more aspects you can drive. For example, in the resonator algorithm you can change the decay time of every resonator. Or with the vocoder algorithm you get to set the frequency and resonance of every band-pass filter. So these spectral tables give you very precise control over many aspects of whichever algorithm you have selected. But it doesn’t stop there.

Modulation and Movement

Just having an image describe parts of your sound is great, but it doesn’t lend itself to a lot of modulation and movement. You’re basically stuck in the exact same place as wavetable synthesis, where you get access to the table position, and that’s it. That’s why Spektral has these things called ‘Alterants’. Alterants are basically little effects or functions that take the spectral information from that slice of the table, and modify it in different ways.

 

You can blur it, filter it, randomize it, remap it, scatter it around, and a bunch of other things. And the important part is that these aren’t just static effects either, they are each controlled by a graph and several normal parameters that you can modulate and automate. These by themselves are already powerful enough that for some sounds you might not even need to load anything into the spectral tables, and you can just use alterants to create your sound. These give a ridiculous amount of control in a very fun and unusual way.

And for all of the nerds out there, Spektral comes with its own custom scripting language in which you can implement your own custom alterants. You can already achieve a lot of the basic things with the built-in alterants, but if you really want to dive deep and create an alterant that does something very specific, you can!

Things I Love About Spektral

Now that I’ve told you what Spektral does, I just want to share some of my personal favorite things you can do in Spektral. 


My favorite algorithm is probably the resonator. It’s essentially just a bank of hundreds of individual little resonators, and you can control their frequency, level, and decay time. If you set it to the noise exciter, and modulate that exciter with a quick envelope, you can make some really beautiful natural-sounding plucks. And if you then change the frequencies of these individual resonators to something inharmonic, you can make really beautiful bells, metallic sounds, and strange inharmonic instruments. Modulating the exciter in different ways gets you sounds that start to resemble strings and other physical instruments. 

Resonators

Another thing I love about Spektral is the ability to make variations of a sound pretty easily and quickly. After you’ve made a patch, you can change out the spectral table for something else to get a different sound. This works incredibly well with the resonator patch I explained above. Swap out the table driving the frequency, and instantly get a different harmonic structure of your bell sounds.

Resonators Variation

I just love that Spektral gives you a way to dive really deep, and get really precise with your sound. But at the same time, you can also just drag and drop a random sample into the table, and mess around with alterants to quickly make something fun. You really get to decide for yourself how complex you make your sound.

Give Spektral A try!

The best way to understand Spektral is to get hands-on with it. Download the free demo, explore the sounds in your own setup, and see where it takes you.

Download The Free Demo

Q&A with Kaixo

We sat down with Kaixo, the producer and developer behind Spektral, to talk about what drove him to spend two years on a passion project, the styles of music he had in mind while building it, and how he thinks spectral synthesis will shape the sound of electronic music in the future.

What was your motivation for making Spektral?

It started out with the idea of being able to draw the spectrum of your sound, that’s where my initial idea for the spectral table came from. But as I started working on it, the idea kept growing. I realized that the same spectral information from the table could be used to control a lot more than just the level of the sine waves in an additive synth. So it slowly morphed into this multi-algorithm spectral manipulation machine.

 

I’ve been working on Spektral for about two years now, and it’s really just been a passion project. I’m a music producer myself and I’ve been making electronic music for over a decade, so a lot of the decisions came from simply asking myself what I would find useful. And I wasn’t trying to make another general-purpose synth that does everything. I just wanted to explore this specific idea of spectral manipulation, and see how far I could take it.

What styles of music did you have in mind when making Spektral?

Originally I thought this would be great for growls and that kind of thing, because you can literally just record your own voice doing a ‘yoy’ and turn it into a bass. But the more I fine-tuned the concept, and added more features, it turned into a synth that’s great for a bunch of different sounds. For example, I really love how you can get very organic-sounding plucks and bells using the resonator algorithm. Just set it to the noise exciter and modulate the exciter with a quick envelope, and then route a spectral table to the decay time and frequency. And you can get a lot of variety simply by just loading different samples into the spectral tables!


So I wouldn’t really say it was designed for one particular genre. You can make anything from heavy dubstep basses, to beautiful bells and plucks. And I think this broad range of possibilities is one of the most interesting things about it. With how dynamic the whole synth and this form of synthesis is, I am pretty sure you can even make a single patch that morphs from a heavy bass into a beautiful pluck, just because there’s so much freedom with how you can modulate and automate everything.

How do you think spectral synthesis is going to shape the sound of electronic music of the future?

I think spectral synthesis is going to give sound designers a different way of thinking about synthesis. With something like a traditional wavetable synth, you’re mostly working with waveforms. With spectral synthesis, you can actually start manipulating the individual pieces that make up the sound. And that just opens up a lot of possibilities for sounds that are difficult or even impossible to create with any subtractive synthesis methods.


One thing I particularly love is making very subtle changes to the higher frequencies of a sound, like slightly detuning them. It’s a really simple thing, but it can give this interesting texture. And you simply can’t do this with subtractive synthesis. But I don’t think spectral synthesis is going to replace other forms of synthesis. Wavetable, subtractive, FM, all of those have their own unique sound. I think spectral synthesis is just another tool in your arsenal that gives you another layer of control over sound.

Kaixo

FiXT Music - Netherlands

Kaixo is a Netherlands-based electronic music producer specializing in high-energy, sci-fi-inspired Drum & Bass and Electro music. Based in Zutphen, Netherlands, Kaixo began his music production journey at the age of 14 when he first experimented with a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).

 

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