Freeware Tutorial: Ambient pads with feedback using Sinnah
You can use the delay matrix on this experimental freeware soft synth to help build unique, feedback-boosted pads.

NUSofting Sinnah
With ambient music, where less is often more, it’s all about using unique and ear-catching sounds. One way to achieve this is by reaching for an instrument with a more experimental approach to synthesis. Enter Sinnah, a freeware virtual analogue soft synth from NUSofting.
Although it appears fairly simple, with a single oscillator, ADSR envelope and LFO, this simplicity belies an unusual approach to synthesis, one that makes extensive use of feedback thanks to its powerful delay matrix.
What you’ll need
- Any DAW
- NUSofting Sinnah, available here.
Before we get into coaxing ambient pads out of Sinnah, let’s take a whistle-stop tour of the instrument, as this will help us get to grips with what exactly it can do.
Jack into the matrix
Open Sinnah in your DAW. It loads with the default AaaaA preset, which is great for getting the lay of the land. In the upper left is the Source section. This is the oscillator. There are five Waves, which start as simple sines but can be made more complex by adjusting the Harmonics dial. As the waveforms are not labelled, look at the oscillator for visual confirmation. The Full button below the Harmonics dial allows for the greatest expression of harmonics.
You can assign the ADSR envelope to the Wave type and Harmonics dial. Try turning these off and on to see how they sound.
Next, let’s check out the Delay Matrix. There are three delay lines that feed into each other. Each delay line has its own LFO, a kind of smoothed out sample-and-hold. Additionally, each voice has its own matrix, so playing the maximum eight voices will result in 24 delay lines and 24 LFOs all doing their own thing.
There’s also a feedback control, which gets saturated by a waveshaper at higher levels. The feedback AD envelope can also affect the feedback. It can get pretty hairy, so be careful at extreme settings.
Now that we have a handle on the basics, let’s make some ambient-ready pads.
String ensemble
Let’s start with a Solina-style string ensemble patch. The triple delay section is perfect for simulating a bucket brigade delay-style chorus circuit, such as the Roland Dimension D.
Start by calling up the piano base patch under the Inits subheading. This gives us a simple sine wave. Uncheck the box linking the Harmonics to the ADSR. Turn the Harmonics dial to 3 or 4 o’clock to add more harmonics. Now we should have a sawtooth-like waveform. You can hear how the Harmonics dial acts as a low-pass filter. Turning on keytracking will add more high-frequency content the higher up the keyboard we play.