For thousands of years, bagpipes have been the sonic terrorist's weapon of choice. Cowsynth brings that terror to the 21st century by taking samples of bagpipes and treating them as oscillators in a simple synthesizer. Though designed with obnoxious big room plucks in mind, it turned out to be a lot more than that. Bagpipes with their strong upper partials make a very nice organic substitute for a saw wave oscillator, and with eight-voice unison they make great pads, strings and organs. And obnoxious bagplucks, too. The pipes themselves were built based on a medieval drawing (so they're not very Scottish), and the bag is cowskin - that's why we gave it the Cowsynth name.

The synth-style controls include AHDSR envelope, pitch vibrato speed and depth, low-pass filter with cutoff and resonance, and extra detune or pluck filter controls sometimes. The mappings range from reasonably bagpipey to totally synthy. The seven mappings are Baggy, Wheezy, Lonely, Asthmatic, Fancy, Shifty and Doc.

The below demo includes Fancy plucks, Shifty lead and Asthmatic pads. The only external effect is reverb.

The below track uses our Cowsynth for the high-pitched plucks after each verse - it's the Fancy mapping.