the ALCHEMY index

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THREE-CIRCUIT DISTORTION

CINDER

VIEW_CINDER

ENGINES

EMBERA symmetric soft clipper that thickens without changing the character of the source. CHARClips harder on one half of the wave, the way a triode stage does, and puts real second harmonic into the signal. ASHA wavefolder. Past the first fold it stops sounding like clipping and starts sounding like a new instrument.

TUBEModels a triode’s bias shift and generates the even harmonics. Body and warmth, on their own control. IRONModels transformer flux and generates the odd series. Edge and aggression, separate from the body. BIASPushes the signal off-centre before the shaper, so even a symmetric circuit clips asymmetrically. The fastest route from clean to vocal. SAGDroops the drive behind a slow rectified envelope, the way a supply rail sags under load. On drums it opens the tail out behind the hit. VARComponent mismatch between the two channels, on purpose. At zero they are identical; the imperfection is something you ask for.

DEEP THROUGH-ZERO FLANGER

MOIRÉ

VIEW_MOIRÉ

Two combs, sliding through each other, and the moment they cross is silence. MOIRÉ is a real through-zero flanger, the kind where the wet delay sweeps past the dry signal instead of stopping short of it. Twice a cycle the two paths land on top of each other and cancel, and the whole track drops through a hole in itself.

Crossing zero costs latency, and this is where flangers usually start lying. Switch THRU-ZERO on and the footer tells you exactly what it cost, and reports that figure to your DAW so every other track stays in sync. Switch it off and the dry path runs live at genuinely zero latency. Two honest modes, and the plugin tells you which one you are in.

FEEDBACKBipolar, centred at zero. Positive resonates on the comb peaks; negative resonates in the notches and hollows the sound out. Two different instruments in one knob. RATE / SHAPE0.02 to 8 Hz. SINE for the classic arc, TRI for a linear ramp, RAND for an 18-step sample-and-hold, a stutter at high rates, a sequence at low ones. MANUAL0.1 to 20 ms of base delay. Short is a tight metallic comb, long is a doubler that flanges, and it sets how many notches sit in the audible band. DISPLAYSURFACE draws the comb response as terrain, flowing at the actual LFO rate. FIELD draws the left and right combs as rakes of notch lines and lets them interfere, the moiré the plugin is named after.

FOUR-ENGINE ALGORITHMIC REVERB

VESTIGE

VIEW_VESTIGE

The delay is inside the room. VESTIGE is a stereo algorithmic reverb whose echo tap sits between the pre-delay and the diffusers, so every repeat re-enters the room as a fresh strike rather than arriving as a delay bolted on in front of it. Four engines, a tempo-locked regenerating echo with its own tone control, and a tank you can freeze. Zero latency.

Four mutually incommensurate delay lines are mixed by a Householder matrix, each carrying its own nested allpasses so echo density grows per circulation instead of arriving flat. Decay runs in three independent bands, and the damping filter sits inside the loop, so highs can only ever die faster than mids, never slower.

ENGINES

DENSEBuys density with memory rather than movement, so pitch-stable material stays pitch-stable. MODIndependent random-step walks per line sweep the mode picket, so a sparse network time-averages into a dense one. PLATEA 56-stage dispersive cascade ahead of the tank. High frequencies arrive first and the initial transient is smeared before density builds. CHORUSThe same tank driven by one coherent modulator, the four lines in quadrature, so it breathes as an ensemble instead of averaging into a smear.

THE ECHOREPEAT from 20 ms to 2 s, SYNC to eleven divisions at host tempo, and TONE voicing the repeats ±3 octaves independently of the room. Dragging REPEAT glides the tap tape-style; a preset recall crossfades instead, so it can never chirp. HOLDFreezes what the tank is already holding and stops new input being injected, so you can play over the result. The echo ring keeps running underneath, so a tempo-locked delay keeps its place through the freeze. DISPLAYA still impulse-scatter field, time, band and energy, with the source strike, the early reflections, the pre-delay floor and the decay envelope drawn on it. It re-seeds on a change and never animates idly.

MULTI-VOICE CHORUS

CONCORD

VIEW_CONCORD

A chorus built around one shared cycle, not several unrelated ones. Every voice is the same LFO, offset by its own share of the loop and detuned outward from centre. VOICE BRAID, the display at the centre of the panel, is not a level meter or an animation, it is the delay line, drawn. The moment every voice's delay lines up is the moment the name is about.

Read left to right, the braid is one full LFO cycle. Read front to back, it is pan. Read up, it is delay time: the ribbon's height at any point is exactly what that voice is doing to the signal at that instant. Nine cross-ties read every voice at the same moment, and where they pull tight the voices agree.

DEPTH / RATEHow far the shared sine actually swings, a clean, full sweep at every setting, low DELAY included, with no dead zone at the bottom of the knob's travel. RATE runs 0.02 to 8 Hz, the same LFO the braid draws. VOICESTwo, four, six or eight taps off one line, each with its own phase offset and alternating detune. More voices does not mean louder, the sum is gain-matched across all four settings. DETUNE / WIDTHUp to 50 cents, split up and down around centre across alternating voices, so the ensemble spreads symmetrically instead of drifting sharp. WIDTH is a constant-power spread, stepped outward per voice. BBD / LO-CUTAn emulated bucket-brigade bandwidth ceiling on the wet path, and a 120 Hz high-pass on the wet path only, the low end you started with stays exactly as it was.

2 VOICES

4 VOICES

6 VOICES

8 VOICES

THREE-VOICE ANALOG-MODELLED PHASER

GIRE

VIEW_GIRE

GIRE is a phaser you choose the circuit for, not the stage count. JFET, OPTICAL and DUAL are three whole networks: how many allpass stages, how they are tuned against each other, how the control signal reaches them, and how the components disagree. The stage count lives in the DSP where it belongs, shown in the panel, never sold as a knob.

A gyre is a rotation slow enough that you never see it close. At the bottom of the rate range GIRE takes thirty-three minutes to come back round, movement you feel across an arrangement rather than hear as an effect.

VOICES

JFETFour matched stages on a smooth sine sweep. The stage coefficient is mildly signal-dependent, so the sweep breathes with playing level. OPTICALFour stagger-tuned stages driven through a lamp and a photocell rather than a clean LFO. It never comes round the same way twice within a cycle. DUALTwo six-stage machines in series per channel, twelve poles, their LFOs decorrelated. Six notch valleys where the others have two.

RATE0.01 to 10 Hz, weighted so most of the throw lives in the slow half. ULTRA SLOW divides by twenty, and the readout always shows the effective rate. WARMTHTurns the component model up rather than adding an EQ or a saturator: it widens the mismatch between stages, deepens the nonlinearity, and tightens the feedback loop's damping as it goes. BODYA phase-coherent split at 150 Hz. At 100% the whole band goes through the network; turn it down and the low fundamental stays out while everything above it swirls. A phaser on a down-tuned riff that keeps its punch.

GEOMETRIC STEREO PROCESSOR

EUCLID

VIEW_EUCLID

A stereo processor built on one plane. Every frequency bin in the music is a point on that plane: its horizontal position is log-frequency measured against ORIGIN, its vertical position is how wide it already is. One geometric transform moves every point at once.

The transform runs in one pass: shear, then scale, then rotate. Both coordinates come back out as sound. The new height becomes that bin's Side share, so a point's height is its width. The new horizontal position becomes its delay tap, so its place along the frequency axis is its time. Width and echo are not two effects side by side. They are two readings of one point.

The field on screen is not a visualiser sitting over that. It plots the real post-transform coordinates and the real per-bin energy, taken from the live path. It invents no particles and draws no trails. When the field tilts on screen, the field tilted.

ORIGINThe pivot, in Hz. Everything turns around it. THE FIELDRADIUS scales, ANGLE shears, ROTATION turns, and RATIO splits the scale between the two axes, so the field can stretch in width without stretching in frequency, or the reverse. SPANHow many octaves make one unit across the plane, from half an octave to ten. A narrow SPAN puts the whole transform inside a few octaves; a wide one spreads it across the spectrum. SYMMETRYActs only below ORIGIN. At zero the plane is even either side of the pivot; raise it and the low half folds toward the pivot until it mirrors the high half. GRAVITYCurves the width axis rather than moving it. Positive pulls every point toward the centre line, hardest on the ones already near it. Negative lifts them away. DELAY / FEEDBACK / DEPTHThe per-bin spectral delay the horizontal axis steers. DEPTH is how much of it is summed back in.

THE MONO CONDITION No setting of the geometry touches Mid, and the wet/dry blend is linear rather than equal-power, so Mid cancels exactly on fold-down. With DEPTH at zero, the mono sum of the output is exactly the input, at any geometry and any MIX. Raising DEPTH sums the spectral delay into both channels, and those taps carry Mid. The guarantee is written at DEPTH zero because zero is where it is true.

TECHNICAL_SPECIFICATIONS // ALL SIX MODULES

PLATFORMmacOS 11.0 Big Sur or later · Apple Silicon and Intel FORMATSVST3 · Audio Unit · AAX for Pro Tools CHANNELSMono through 9.1.6

Six modules, $25 each with code ALCHEMY50.

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