When in doubt, though, just start with a preset and tweak from there! The Kern user interface is simply designed, not too overwhelming, and relatively easy to configure (some working knowledge of hardware or modular synths is always helpful). If you’re looking for more “realistic” sounds, I suppose you might want to look elsewhere, but with some effects and a bit of tweaking, the Kern sounds can be quite good even for modern production. Since you can take presets and modify them, or even start from scratch and customize your own, you can pull a lot of different sounds out of the Kern. And it’s got so many great sounds (whether pad or leads), honestly you should be able to find usable sounds (presets) for EDM or anything else you’re producing. It works perfectly for retro 80s style productions, and therefore synthwave. Kern is a personal favorite and go-to of mine. With Kern, you get MIDI Learn, two user panels, 32 voice polyphony including portamento, two band-limited oscillators including Hard Sync, two types of four-pole zero-delay feedback lowpass filters, two envelopes (one LFO), chorus, and double precision audio processing. It is fully compatible with MIDI keyboard controllers, as you would expect, and its CPU consumption is notably low.

Full Bucket Music’s Kern is a polyphonic software synthesizer designed with Windows and Mac OS in mind.