I don't really write these. I point Claude at the manual for some piece
of hardware I can't justify buying, and a few hours later there are
several thousand lines of C++, a CMake file, a GitHub Actions workflow
building for three platforms, and a plugin that mostly works.
They are free, there are builds for macOS, Windows and Linux on each
project's releases page, and the source is on GitHub.
A Euclidean drum sequencer. Sixteen lanes, each spreading a set
number of hits as evenly as possible across its steps, with hand edits,
ratchets and chance on top. Sixteen patterns and a chain per lane,
sixteen scenes for the arrangement, and a SCATTER button. VST3 for Live,
Audio Unit MIDI effect for Logic.
A chord generator. 158 chord sets, twelve chords each, one per
key of the octave. Play them straight, strummed,
held or arpeggiated, then drag what you played into a clip.
A stochastic melody and rhythm generator. Set the odds for each
note value and each semitone, roll the dice, and it writes a
monophonic line that follows your transport. Lock it, loop a window of
it, or let it re-roll every pass.
A semi-modular percussion synthesiser. Two oscillators with hard
sync and linear FM, noise, a switchable ladder filter, three decay
envelopes, an eight-step sequencer, and a 24-point patchbay with cables
that actually work.
A microtonal melody explorer. Pick a maqam, a raga or any Scala
tuning and it improvises a melody in it over a drone, leaning on the strong
notes and ending phrases where the mode wants them to. Reshape the scale
note by note, swap a maqam's upper jins to modulate, or play along from
your keyboard.
A polyrhythmic undertone synthesiser. Two oscillators, each
carrying two subharmonic dividers, four rhythm generators dividing one
clock, and two four-step sequencers turning those whole-number ratios
into patterns that drift in and out of phase with each other.
A color and texture effect. Four modules in any order — drive
and fuzz, modulation, echoes and reverb, and worn tape and bad radio
— with five effects each, a knob recorder that loops your moves,
and a looper that can hold a chord as a pad.
A vocoder and vocal harmoniser. Sing into a microphone and play notes
from a keyboard or Posy: the vocoder puts your
words on the synth, and four harmony voices and a double sing along in your
own voice, following the chord you play or the key you're in.
A reverb suite. Twenty-nine types, from room ambience and halls to
plates, springs, shimmer, a choir, gated and reverse shapes and tape echo.
Type what you want to find one, shape it with the same knobs whatever it
is, and see the actual tail you've made, measured as you turn.
A delay suite. Twelve types, from a clean digital echo to tape,
bucket-brigade analog, lo-fi radio, tremolo, sweeping filters, swells,
backwards slices and pitched ice. Tap or sync the time, shape every
repeat, and see each echo land against the song's beats.
A mixing suite. Eleven modules on a channel strip for every track:
gate, a dynamic equaliser, two compressors, transient shaping, saturation,
spectral tools, phase alignment and a clipper. Copies on different tracks
see each other, to show where they clash and to balance them all on one
mixer pad. ASSIST builds a chain for whatever the track is.
A mastering assistant. Pick a style and where the song is going,
press LEARN and play it. One knob sets the EQ, compression, saturation
and width, the limiter lands the loudness on the target, and a strip
shows what each stage is doing so you learn as you go.
A mastering suite. Eighteen modules on one reorderable chain:
equalisers, multiband and vintage dynamics, a true-peak Maximizer,
saturation, width, tape and spectral tools, with loudness metering and
dither. ASSIST listens to the song and builds a chain toward a genre or a
reference.
Mostly Dicey: the bassline into a 303, and the
lead melody. Percussion from Beadwork into a
909 kit.
Stabby dance (4:36)
Melodies from Fractone, with
Stepkin and Dicey
layered up for the percussion. Further down in the mix, more
Dicey drives a stock reese bass and some stock
percussion kits. The stab is just a sample I liked.
Installing any of them
Every release is a zip (or a tar.gz on Linux) with the plugin inside.
macOS — put the .vst3 in
~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3, then clear the quarantine flag: