Modartt has spent twenty years on one unfashionable idea: model the physics instead of recording the instrument. Pianoteq made the case convincingly — a piano that fits in a few dozen megabytes and behaves like an instrument rather than a library of samples, because it’s simulated rather than played back.
Airteq, out now at €99, applies that thinking somewhere stranger. It models air.
What it actually is
Not an organ emulation, and not a synth in the oscillator sense. Modartt calls the engine Dynamic Aerophone Modeling, and describes it as simulating everything from the moment air is generated to the point it enters the pipes and becomes sound.
That framing is the product. In an acoustic aerophone, the interesting behaviour is all in the excitation: how air is driven, how it becomes turbulent, how it couples to the resonator, how it breaks into a higher mode when you push too hard. Samples capture the results. A model lets you play the causes.
You get:
- Selectable pipe families — flutes, reeds, mixtures — with different timbral characters
- Three air response modes: flute overblow, glissando, and steady pitch
- Four parameters per model: tune, air, volume, pan
- Three ADSR envelopes, three LFOs, two macros and gesture controls
- Convolution reverb with several impulse responses
- 170+ factory presets
- Full MPE, velocity, pitch bend and aftertouch
VST3, AU, LV2 and AAX plus standalone, on macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux. Linux support is not a given for commercial instruments, and Modartt has always shipped it.
Why the overblow modes are the headline
Flute overblow is where this stops being a preset browser and becomes an instrument. On a real flute or organ pipe, blowing harder past a threshold doesn’t make it louder — it jumps the pipe to a higher harmonic, an octave or a twelfth up. It’s a discontinuity, and it’s a large part of why wind instruments feel alive and why sampled ones don’t.
Model that, map it to MPE pressure, and you get a real playing technique: push into a note and it breaks upward. Sample libraries fake this with crossfades and round-robins, which is why sampled flutes sound convincing until you try to play expressively through the transition.
Who it’s for
Sound designers first. An engine that models air behaviour will make plenty of sounds that don’t resemble any pipe — breath noise, unstable tones, things that whistle and collapse — and that’s usually where physical modelling earns its price. Composers wanting a specific organ or a realistic flute should look elsewhere; this isn’t an emulation of a named instrument.
At €99 it sits below most serious modelled instruments, and there’s a free trial.