Developer Brian Clevinger (Absynth) has released a demo version of his new software synth, Plasmonic.
It’s available now for both MacOS & Windows.
“Our goal is for Plasmonic to approach the depth and detail of an acoustic instrument,” he notes, “while making it easy to shape the sound into anything you want. Its deep modulation capability and MPE support make it very playable and expressive.”
Features:
- 4 audio sources:
- 2 wavetable oscillators with dynamic wave transformations
- A special impulse generator for making the waveguide ring
- A noise generator with its own resonant lowpass filter
- 2 interacting filters:
- A self-oscillating waveguide provides organic resonance
- A multimode self-oscillating ladder filter: LP, HP, BP, 1, 2 and 4 pole, formants filter and LP+HP in parallel and series
- Each filter can take any combination of audio sources
- Can be configured in series or parallel
- Polyphonic saturation
- Self-oscillating delay effects
- Deep, precise modulation system
- Multiple ADSR and LFOs with unique features
- 8 configurable control macros
- MPE support
Limitations of the evaluation version:
- Save is disabled
- No total recall
- Audio stops after 30 minutes
Details on pricing and availability are still to be announced, but Clevinger says he expects to make announcements soon.
Another sign that it can be a nice time to be into Physical Modelling, partly through MPE.
Typically, a big issue with PM is that parameters interact in complex ways. Unlike Subtractive, it can be hard to know what a knob or slider does “on its own” because things might change radically based on some other value. When you get 3 or 4 of these parameters in an interaction, things get really hard to control (as with medicine).
Hopefully, the Subtractive part of Plasmonic will make it easier to wield.
While it’s true that several PM synths revolve around instrumental emulation, any PM synth can be leveraged for crazy sounds. And some, like Respiro or even Chromaphone, have lots of patches which aren’t associated with any existing acoustic instrument yet sound like “hypothetical instruments”.
Interesting that this would be waveguide. The short section about emulation of a plucked string sounded more like Karplus-Strong. Guess I’m still easily-fooled, there. Even moForte’s PM GeoShred is mostly based on waveguide despite the preponderance of plucked strings which sound like they’d be somewhat achievable by KPS. Since Julius O. Smith III is on the moForte team, everything is possible, there.
Even a Yamaha collab to revive some of the drive behind VL/VP synths? That’d be a stretch. I’m in a dreamy mood.
Watched Plug-in Guru demo this the other day. Very cool. Lots of possibilities for new sonic fun. Look forward to more info. I still have the first version of Absynth and have updated it each time. So very interested in anything this brilliant developer does.