Get access to microtones in your digital audio workstation with these specialized VSTs
Whatever brought you here, welcome. Microtonal music isn’t as complicated as it sounds — and the tools available today make it easier than ever to dive in.
This guide is written for producers and musicians who are comfortable making music in a DAW but haven’t ventured into non-standard tuning territory yet. We’ll explain the basics as we go.
What Is Microtonal Music, Anyway?
Every piece of music you’ve heard on Western radio uses 12 notes per octave, equally spaced. This is called 12-tone equal temperament (often abbreviated 12-TET or 12-EDO). It’s the tuning system your piano, guitar, and virtually every VST plugin defaults to.
But those 12 notes aren’t the only notes that exist. In reality, pitch is a continuous spectrum, and musical traditions across the world — Arabic maqam, Indian ragas, Turkish makam, Indonesian gamelan — all make use of notes that fall betweenthe keys on a standard piano. These “in-between” notes are called microtones, and music that uses them is microtonal music.
Even in Western classical music, tuning systems like just intonation (tuning intervals based on pure mathematical ratios) and historical meantone temperaments predate 12-TET and offer a richer, often more resonant sound. Exploring microtones doesn’t mean abandoning melody and harmony — it means expanding your palette.
The challenge has always been: how do you get your DAW and plugins to play these “extra” notes? That’s where the plugins below come in.
A Quick Note on Tuning Formats
Before diving into the list, it helps to know a few terms you’ll see repeatedly:
- Scala (.scl / .kbm files) — The most widely supported format for describing microtonal scales. A .scl file defines the pitches in a scale, and a .kbm (keyboard mapping) file tells the software which MIDI keys correspond to those pitches.
- .tun files — An alternative tuning format (AnaMark format) supported by many synths.
- MTS-ESP — A modern standard that lets one “master” plugin control the tuning of many other plugins simultaneously, in real time.
- MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) — A MIDI extension that allows per-note pitch bends, which can be used to achieve microtonal pitch in compatible instruments.
Now, let’s get to the plugins.
1. Surge XT (Free)
Surge XT is a remarkable open-source hybrid synthesizer, and it’s completely free. It has become something of a gold standard in the microtonal community because of its unusually thorough tuning implementation. It can load Scala .scl and .kbm files directly, and it also supports MTS-ESP (see below), allowing it to be retuned by an external master plugin. As of recent versions, Surge XT can even act as an MTS-ESP master, broadcasting tuning to other compatible plugins in your session.
Sound-wise, Surge XT is no slouch either — it features 12 different oscillator algorithms including wavetable, FM, and string modes, a deep modulation system, and nearly 30 built-in effect types. It’s a genuinely powerful synth that happens to also be one of the most microtonal-friendly instruments available.
Best for: Musicians who want a powerful, free, all-in-one synth with serious microtonal depth.
2. Vital (Free / Paid tiers)
Vital is a spectral warping wavetable synthesizer that has quickly become one of the most popular free VSTs in the world — and it has solid microtonal support built in. You can import Scala .scl and .kbm files directly through Vital’s tuning menu, instantly retuning the synth to your chosen scale.
Vital sounds stunning: lush, modern, great at everything from bass to pads to leads. The free version gives you access to the full synth engine with a smaller preset library. Because of its popularity, there’s a massive community of preset makers and tutorial creators around it, which means getting started is easy.
One limitation worth knowing: Vital’s filters don’t retune with the tuning file system (they stay in standard pitch), which matters for some advanced microtonal sound design techniques. But for most users making melodies and chords in an alternative scale, this won’t be an issue.
Best for: Producers already familiar with Vital who want to dip their toes into microtonal territory with minimal friction.
3. Entonal Studio (Paid, free trial available)
Entonal Studio takes a different and very clever approach: instead of being a synth itself, it’s a plugin host and MIDI effect that sits in your DAW and retuneswhatever instruments you load inside it. This means you can take your favourite VST instruments — ones that don’t normally support microtonal tuning at all — and make them microtonal anyway. Entonal sends per-note pitch bend or MPE data to the instruments it hosts, tricking them into playing the correct pitches.
The interface is built around a visual “radial graph” that makes it intuitive to design and visualise scales. You can import and export Scala files, use a library of included tunings, and share your own scales with Entonal’s community via Discord. It also has a Group function that lets you sync multiple instances of Entonal across different tracks, so when you change the tuning in one place, all tracks update at once.
Best for: Producers who love their existing sample libraries and synths and don’t want to replace them — Entonal makes almost anything microtonal.
4. ODDSound MTS-ESP Mini (Free) / MTS-ESP Suite (Paid)
MTS-ESP is not a synth — it’s a tuning infrastructure standard, and ODDSound’s plugin is what makes it practical to use. The idea is simple but powerful: one “master” plugin in your session broadcasts a tuning to all other “client” plugins that support the standard. Change the tuning in the master, and every compatible synth in your project updates instantly.
Interestingly, the MTS-ESP standard was developed with input from Richard James — also known as Aphex Twin — who demonstrated his custom-firmware Rhodes Chroma synthesizer to the developers and helped motivate software companies to support the format.
The free MTS-ESP Mini lets you load .scl, .kbm, and .tun files and broadcast that tuning to all MTS-ESP compatible plugins. The paid MTS-ESP Suite adds the ability to create tuning systems from scratch, automate tuning changes over time (imagine morphing between two different scales during a track), and get detailed visual feedback on your tuning. Supported plugins include those from U-He, Audio Damage, TAL, Surge XT, Xfer Records, and many others, with more developers adding support regularly.
Best for: Anyone working with multiple instruments in one session who wants everything tuned consistently without loading tuning files into each plugin individually.
5. MicroToner by TAQS.IM (Paid)
MicroToner takes yet another approach to the microtonal problem. Rather than being a synth or a plugin host, it’s a MIDI effect that works by modifying pitch bend data on the fly. You play your regular MIDI keyboard and MicroToner intercepts the note messages, adding the appropriate pitch bend to each note to achieve the microtonal pitches you’ve specified.
This means it works with virtually any instrument that responds to pitch bend — which is most of them. It was specifically designed with world music in mind, particularly Arabic and Middle Eastern scales, and it’s available as both a standalone app and a plugin (VST, AU) for use directly in your DAW on Mac, Windows, and even iOS/iPad. Reviews from producers working with Arabic, Turkish, and Persian music styles have been especially enthusiastic.
The main limitation is that MicroToner is designed around 12-note scales (one tunable pitch per standard piano key), so if you want to work with scales containing more than 12 pitches per octave, you’ll need to look at other tools.
Best for: Producers of Middle Eastern, Arabic, Turkish or Persian-influenced music who want to retune their existing instrument libraries quickly and intuitively.
6. Infinitone 2 (Paid, free trial available)
Infinitone 2 is a microtonal synth plugin that aims to make exploring alternative tunings feel fun and approachable rather than technical and intimidating. It includes a built-in synth engine as well as a MIDI output mode that can retune external instruments. The interface is designed to let you dial in pitches and scales visually, with a curated library of presets covering everything from just intonation and the harmonic series to traditional scales from around the world.
Notably, Infinitone 2 also supports MTS-ESP, so it can function as an MTS-ESP master and push its tuning out to other compatible plugins in your session. Each track in your DAW can have its own independent tuning through Infinitone, which opens up compositional ideas like having different instruments playing in different (but complementary) tuning systems simultaneously. The plugin attracted early attention when musician Adam Neely and Jacob Collier were filmed reacting to it enthusiastically.
Best for: Musicians who want an all-in-one beginner-friendly microtonal environment with preset-driven inspiration and room to grow.
7. Pianoteq (Paid, free trial available)
Pianoteq is primarily known as the world’s best physically-modelled piano plugin — it sounds incredible and runs on almost no CPU or disk space. But it’s also one of the most microtonal-friendly piano instruments you can find. Its “Advanced Tuning” panel lets you load Scala .scl and .kbm files, dial in historical temperaments (meantone, Pythagorean, well temperaments, etc.) by hand, or set up custom equal divisions of the octave (e.g. 19-EDO, 31-EDO, 53-EDO) at the click of a button.
What makes Pianoteq special for microtonal use is that because it models the piano physically rather than using samples, the entire resonance of the instrument — string harmonics, damper resonance, body acoustics — all respond correctly to the retuned pitches. A sampled piano plugin will always be “cheating” with pitch-bend tricks; Pianoteq actually recalculates the physics. The result is that microtonal piano voicings in Pianoteq sound genuinely rich and natural rather than slightly “bent.”
Best for: Composers and producers who want to explore historical temperaments or microtonal piano writing with acoustic realism.
8. Scale Workshop (Free, browser-based)
Scale Workshop isn’t technically a VST plugin — it’s a free, open-source web app that runs in your browser. But it earns a place on this list because it’s an essential tool for anyone working with microtonality in a DAW. Scale Workshop lets you design, visualise, and hear microtonal scales, then export them in the formats your other plugins need (.scl, .kbm, .tun, Kontakt scripts, and more).
It was originally created by microtonal musician Sevish and is now developed by a community of contributors. You can generate equal temperaments (like 19-EDO or 31-EDO), rank-2 temperaments, just intonation scales, and much more — or just load one of thousands of existing scale files available online. You can even play the scale in your browser using your computer keyboard before committing to it. It also works with Web MIDI, so you can use it to retune hardware synths in real time.
Best for: Anyone who needs to create, convert, or explore tuning files — it’s the Swiss Army knife of microtonal scale design and an essential free companion to the plugins above.
9. MICROTONE 5000 by BipTunia (Free)
If you want to start experimenting with microtonal sounds without spending anything, MICROTONE 5000 is a charming, community-favourite free option. It’s a fairly simple VST synthesizer bundled with over 5,000 microtonal tuning files covering an enormous range of tuning systems — equal temperaments, just intonation scales, experimental tunings, world music scales, and more.
The workflow is straightforward: load a preset sound, pick a tuning from the library, and start playing. It’s not the most sophisticated synth engine in the world, and the interface has been described as “eccentric,” but the sheer variety of included tuning files makes it a fantastic sandbox for exploration. Users regularly report spending hours just dialling through tunings and discovering sounds they never expected. The developer has also provided a detailed user guide, tutorials, and example compositions.
Best for: Beginners who want to explore hundreds of different tuning systems for free, with zero upfront cost.
10. ZynAddSubFX / ZynFusion (Free / Paid UI)
ZynAddSubFX is a long-standing open-source synthesizer with a uniquely deep and distinctive sound, built around additive, subtractive, and pad synthesis. It’s been a staple of the Linux audio community for years, and supports full-keyboard microtuning via Scala .scl and .kbm files.
ZynFusion is a modernised version with an updated user interface. The synth’s additive synthesis engine — where you can individually tune the harmonics of a sound — makes it particularly well-suited to microtonal experimentation, since you can craft timbres that actually align with the harmonic ratios of your chosen tuning system. This is an advanced concept (matching timbre to tuning is sometimes called “timbral consonance”), but even without going that deep, ZynAddSubFX produces genuinely unique and powerful sounds that complement microtonal compositions well.
Best for: Experimenters and sound designers who want a free, deep synth with solid microtonal support and a sound unlike anything else on the market.
Where to Start
If you’re completely new to this, here’s a simple starting path:
Open Scale Workshop in your browser and spend ten minutes browsing preset scales — play them with your keyboard and just listen. Once you find a tuning that appeals to you, export it as a .scl file. Then load it into Surge XT or Vital(both free) and start writing a melody or chord progression. That’s really all there is to it.
From there, if you want to retune instruments you already own and love, look at Entonal Studio or MTS-ESP Mini. If you’re producing music rooted in Arabic or Middle Eastern traditions, MicroToner is hard to beat for its simplicity. And if you’re composing for piano specifically, Pianoteq is in a class of its own.
The microtonal world is enormous — there are tuning communities, podcasts, albums, and academic traditions stretching back centuries — but you don’t need to understand any of that to start making interesting music today. Just pick a scale that sounds good to you and play.
Further Reading
- Xenharmonic Wiki — The most comprehensive resource on microtonal music theory, tuning systems, and software.
- List of Microtonal Software Plugins — A detailed, community-maintained list of every plugin with microtonal support, updated regularly.
- Sevish’s Music Blog — Tutorials, guides, and album releases from one of the most accessible voices in contemporary microtonal music.
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