Minimal Audio’s Current, more than even most sprawling soft synths, is as much a sound creation laboratory as it is an instrument. Current 2.0 and online updates helped realize their original vision, and it stands out as a highlight of last year – and one to dig in deeper in 2025.
Current got off to a shaky start with some folks because it was unveiled with a subscription model. You can go that route if you want, but two things have changed. First, you can buy everything for 199 $/EUR, and that’s a perpetual license – including the Current 2.0 update I describe here, for free. Or you can get everything Minimal Audio makes for 15 $/EUR a month, which is also subscribe-to-own – rather than losing your investment in the subscription, you get a monthly credit back toward ownership. That’s the formula: don’t force customers into subscriptions if they want to pay-to-own, and use rent-to-own, not just rent.
There are a lot of hybrid/wavetable polysynths on the market, though, so your question is whether this is worth your time, not just your money.
I liked Current a lot, as I wrote in my initial review. But even though the free Current 2.0 update might not immediately look like that much on paper, it made this synth into an essential, even with some other powerful tools in that rotation (Pigments, Surge XT, Rhizomatic Plasmonic).
Quick review – what the heck is this?
Current is another multi-engine polysynth with a bunch of content – but really a bunch of content, as they feed you with new presets, samples, and wavetables monthly. That should not mean you ignore what’s under the hood:
- Dual spectral wavetable oscillators with warp effects
- Multi-mode sampler engine with time stretching
- Granular sampler engine (up to 250+ grains, which somehow does run easily on my machine)
- Dual morphing filters
- Sub oscillator
- FM/AM routing and feedback
- Deep modulation system (envelopes, LFOs, swappable)
- Effects rack and a bunch of effects (with sub-presets inside)
- MPE support
Mmmm, granular:
Mmmm, subs:
That puts it in the running with the likes of NI Maschine X, Arturia Pigments, and the free Surge XT, but with some unique approaches to the engines and capabilities. There’s nothing quite like this particular combination. And it gets a free update, not only for subscribers, but perpetual license owners, too.
What’s new
Play View. First, yes, another “pretty interface for navigating presets/macros” – though this one has a twist. Because you have dual XY pads to modulate, and because of the sheer depth of Currents and its sound tools and layers, you can get a lot of variety out of this. It winds up being a great starting point for navigating the vastness of the content library, even if you’re the type to modify presets.
Play is aimed at beginners, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to sound designers or even for your own patches – everything is assignable. Here’s the default view, unmapped:
Anyway, as you may have guessed, that wasn’t the main draw for v2.0 for me. That’ll be this –
Wave Shifter. It’s a phaser, it’s a frequency shifter, it’s a ring modulator, it’s amplitude modulation, it’s FM, it’s all in a synth interface that recalls some of the best of vintage Buchla and Yamaha modulation, but is thoroughly contemporary in design. It’s amazing – see the detailed tour below.
There’s even more factory content. 400+ presets, 170+ wavetables, 800+ samples. And that’s where Current gets really insane. If you ever just needed to find something out of the ordinary, in a hurry, this is just brilliant – and you still have the feeling that you can fully customize whatever you produce. There’s great sound content out in the world, but a lot of it already sounds, well, done. Current is just full of secret weapons you can combine into something no one has heard before.
They’ve also added a Stream Pack View that makes it easier to navigate some of the new stuff, without being as annoying as some “companion” tools on the market. This is one I did actually use.
Mixer panel. This is critical because of how much you work with layers in Currents. It was way too easy in Current 1.0 to come up with something interesting and accidentally distort your own patch with improper gain staging. Now, all that layering and routing is manageable, and you can solo individual components as you work – plus still more modulation.
Overhauled modulation. There’s a modulation matrix popup so you can see what’s connected to what, and you get unlimited modulator connections. Modulation was actually a big plus of Current 1.0, but it’s now really workable. Right-click to bring up the mod matrix:
Here’s where Current starts to make loads of sense, because managing modulation between this many layers, synth engines, and various effects would not be nearly as convenient if you only did it in your host.
Yes, yes, that horizontal row of envelopes and modulators and curves is looking pretty familiar in the UI – see also the likes of Arturia. But I’m not complaining; back to NI’s original Maschine, the plugin industry has been picking up conventions on how to handle on-screen modulation. Since some of us plug-in addicts regularly switch between tools, it’s pretty useful to have the best ideas showing up everywhere.
Enhanced performance and UI. They’ve cleaned up the UI, they’ve adding better search and keyboard navigation for all that content, and somehow now support up to 32-voice polyphony even with all that stuff. (I still didn’t max this out on my M1 Pro, though!)
There’s a wavetable spectrum display. Ooh, pretty. Also useful.
Wave Shifter is a revelation
If you have an unhealthy affection for modulation, Wave Shifter is for you. Part of the joy of what Minimal Audio has done is packing a ton of their unique effects and animated visual interfaces into a polysynth, with the advantages of internal signal routing that you might not get from your host (plus the ability to save those effects with your presets easily).
Wave Shifter is the best of these yet. Counter-clockwise from top right:
Style. You can set this to frequency shifter, ring mod, or amplitude mod – so you have three modulation effects in one – plus stereo and mid/side modes. What’s nice is, once that’s set, you can tweak to your heart’s delight. You can even chain multiple effects, since you can add this to an insert slot.
Modulation. The internal modulator is applied to the phaser, with a ton of additional options. There’s LFO rate and shape, with the ability to snap or morph shapes and apply randomization and stereo offset. You can also randomize the LFO’s stereo effects to widen the results (that’s that button in the center, which you might easily miss).
FM/internal oscillator. The FM section has its own set of options. You can choose source – Noise, Sine, Even, or “Dirty” internally or the input or output signals. Then set ratio and amount.
Next to that you get a full oscillator section. The frequency knob you can set to audio rate (“Fast,” in Hz), MIDI pitch (“Tuned,” by note name), LFO-rate (“Slow,” in Hz), or synced to BPM. There’s a Soft Sync toggle which adds a little pleasant harmonic distortion. And you get frequency spread and stereo width controls.
Filter, feedback. There’s a filter with width, of course, but then – oh Hell, yes – feedback with sync.
Minimal’s consistent approach can be addictive, too including the input sent mode (which leaves dry signal alone when toggled on) and soft clip limiter modes.
(I was a fan of the dedicated FM module NI built into Maschine ages ago. This has the appeal of that but on steroids.)
Look, it is not an exaggeration to say that Current is worth playing with for Wave Shifter alone. Even though you have all that ridiculous amount of content, you can just pull up some simple oscillators and just tweak Wave Shifter. Watch a quick demo of that:
Keep in mind that this is atop all the existing dedicated conventional FM/AM capabilities of the synth, which were already formidable:
Conclusions
To say we’re spoiled in soft synths would be an understatement. You also get the sense that all the modular action has infected software, too, with deeper modulation capabilities, even in what is technically a semi-modular environment. But Current is special, thanks to Minimal Audio’s obsessive, idiosyncratic approach. Combining sample manipulation and spectral wavetable engines, granular powers and a sub-oscillator mode gives you a simply ridiculous amount of sonic power. Current is the perfect instrument when you want to produce something otherworldly.
It’s so powerful that it can be overwhelming sometimes – though the Play and Stream updates do help give you a starting point. And I’d love to see some tweaks to tuning; it really calls out for complete tuning support. But even though it’s hard to describe, Current really isn’t just another polysynth – it’s a marathon run through a toy store of sound powers and modulation. It is Super Toy Run for sound designers and composers. And sometimes, that’s exactly what you want.