Schranz, hard techno, industrial – all from a single plugin. With IRONCORE, Frequenzbetrieb n.e.V. releases its first own software synthesizer: a specialised lead synth for aggressive, moving techno sounds. Free, open source and available for Windows and macOS.
What is IRONCORE?
Most synthesizers do a bit of everything. IRONCORE does one thing really well: turning MIDI notes into punchy, sawing, screaming leads – from rave hoovers and metallic industrial stabs to squelching acid lines. No chain of five extra plugins, no steep learning curve.
At its heart are five performance macros: HEAT (saturation and harmonics), BITE (resonance and edge), MORPH (from saw through FM metal to vocal formants), MOVEMENT (how much everything moves) and DENSITY (unison, width, body). One turn – and the sound heads somewhere completely different.
How IRONCORE sounds
The signal runs through five stages that build on each other. Each one can be pushed as far as your track needs – or switched off completely when you want it clean.
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- Core Oscillator: wavetables, FM with feedback, Casio-CZ-style phase distortion, a plucked resonator, pitched noise and supersaw with up to seven voices
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- Iron Filter: a non-linear 4-pole ladder filter that eats the bass and squelches at high resonance – plus a second filter, serial or parallel
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- Damage Circuit: six distortion characters from tube and fuzz to rectifier, a wavefolder, clipping and a bitcrusher
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- Character FX: comb filter, phaser, frequency shifter and tempo-synced stutter
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- Space: ping-pong delay, a dark techno reverb and a sidechain-style tempo pump
The Rave Motion Sequencer
The core of the Schranz workflow: a single held note becomes a sequence. Per step, the sequencer changes not just the filter but also FM, timbre, pitch, gate, accent and slide. Different lane lengths create polyrhythms that slowly drift against each other. Eight patterns can be switched live via MIDI notes – straight from your clip.
82 presets to get started
From SCHRANZ Pitch Impact and ACID Warehouse 303 to INDUSTRIAL Comb Grinder and RAVE 92 Hoover – all presets are loudness-matched so you can compare them fairly. Save your own sounds with one click, and the RANDOM button gives you musically sensible random patches whenever you need inspiration.
Open source – from the scene, for the scene
IRONCORE is free and open source under the GNU AGPLv3. Anyone may use, study, modify and share the plugin. The music you make with it is, of course, entirely yours.
The complete source code is on GitHub, where every change is automatically built and tested for Windows and macOS. We welcome bug reports, preset ideas, tests in different DAWs and, of course, code contributions.
All versions & changes · Source code on GitHub · The download links always deliver the latest version automatically.
System requirements
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- Windows: 64-bit, a VST3-capable DAW (e.g. Ableton Live, Bitwig, Reason, Cubase, FL Studio, Studio One) or as a standalone application
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- macOS: macOS 11 or later, Apple Silicon and Intel; VST3, Audio Unit (Logic, GarageBand) or standalone
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- A detailed manual (currently in German) is included with every download
Note: the builds are not code-signed yet. Windows may show a SmartScreen warning (“More info → Run anyway”), and macOS needs to allow the plugin once. Instructions are on the download page.
Get involved
Producing techno and want to make IRONCORE better? Try it, build presets and tell us what is missing – on GitHub or directly to the association. If you like the project, please consider supporting our work with a donation.