Vangelis, Depeche Mode, The Orb and Technotronic all reached for the Matrix-12, and it earned a reputation for the thickest analogue pads, sweeps, basses and textures ever recorded.

Created in collaboration with Oberheim and Marcus Ryle, one of the original designers, who worked alongside the team throughout, GForce modelled the oscillators, filter, and envelope shapes against the hardware. The goal was simple and non-negotiable: sound like a Matrix-12.

Each voice has two VCOs with triangle, saw, and pulse; the second adds noise and hard sync, feeding a filter with fifteen modes: one-to-four pole low pass, high pass, band pass, notch, phase, and the classic combinations, then two VCAs in series.

Simple on purpose. The complexity is in what moves it.

Five envelopes, five LFOs, four ramps, three trackers and a lag processor inside every voice, alongside a dedicated vibrato. Keyboard, velocity, release velocity, pressure, pitch bend and mod wheel, plus full MPE.

A random value on every note, so no two voices ever land in quite the same place. Any source can reach any destination, including itself. Drag a crosshair from a source and drop it on a knob. Six modulation slots per parameter, each bipolar, each with quantise. A green corona on the knob shows exactly where the sound will go.

Flow draws a live diagram of the voice: the audio path in blue, and every modulation source appears as you connect it, highlighting the whole chain when you touch a control.

The Mod Matrix lays out every connection as a grid you can sort, filter and edit. The Visualiser shows you the sound itself. Every module has its own scope, filter curve, envelope shape or tracker graph, and you can grab and drag them directly.

Single mode plays all twelve voices as one instrument with polyphony, unison, detune and spread on the panel. Multi mode makes every voice its own timbre, with six keyboard zones that can overlap, each with its own voice allocation, MIDI channel and micro arpeggiator.

Solo, copy, paste, lock and disable per voice; load a single voice from any patch; and use Relative Edit to move a whole zone at once.

GForce focused on the programming experience. The Matrix-12 is still a monster of a synthesiser, with modulation possibilities that can feel awe-inspiring, but assigning multiple modulations on the original hardware navigating its complexity; now it’s fast and intuitive. The result is a legendary instrument that’s far more accessible to sound designers, without sacrificing any of its depth or complexity.

GForce rebuilt the Matrix-12 workflow with drag-and-drop modulation, the Flow diagram, the Mod Matrix, and a visualiser on every module, bringing the entire modulation system into view, while per-voice load, copy and lock, Relative Edit, and a fully resizable interface make editing twelve voices fast and direct.

New sound features include six micro arpeggiators, one for each keyboard zone; tempo-synced ramps with linear-to-exponential curves; smoothing on every LFO shape; and a stepped tracker mode that turns any LFO into a four-step sequence. Full MPE, four global Macros and GForce’s stereo delay and matrix reverb, with per-voice sends in Multi mode, complete the instrument.