Parasite: the FM synth that eats your chords for breakfast

Stumbled on this one a few days ago and it has not left my drive since. Parasite from Voidscan Audio is a 3-operator FM synth with six algorithms, but forget the polite DX7 vibes. This thing is built for rot.

The per-voice distortion chain is the headline. Drive and Fold run on every voice before the output, so chords stack into grit instead of smearing into mush. Then you have the Vortex and Helix macros bending the harmonic ratios around and Plasma pushing modulator levels, and that is where the sounds start melting into each other in the best way.

There are also these two material-style effects, Liquid and Rubber, that push whatever you feed them toward those textures. The 32-step gate sits after the reverb, which means you can drown something in space and then chop the finished mix into rhythm. Three hand-drawable LFOs with eight slots each covering 64 destinations should keep any sequenced chaos busy.

I usually ignore randomize buttons, but the Randomize and Mutate functions here follow their own recipe instead of throwing dice at every knob, and they actually spit out usable starting points. 153 factory presets across eight categories, with 66 of them drums and FX. You can even send a preset to another Parasite user from inside the plugin.

The demo is the full plugin and it goes quiet briefly every 30 seconds, which is honest enough to respect. It runs VST3 and AU on macOS, VST3 on Windows.

Price: 59 EUR introductory until 23 October 2026, then 89 EUR.

Get it here: https://voidscan-audio.com/