In Sine Machine, effects are an integrated part of the additive synthesis engine itself.
Sine Machine’s raw power of truly independent harmonic oscillators opens up access to brand new sonic frontiers: per-harmonic effects.
With full access to every harmonic over time, we’ve taken the unique opportunity to ground-up redesign what kind of direct control one can have over a synthesized tone.
Where’s the reverb?
In your DAW.
No, seriously! It’s your best choice anyway! You don’t want my attempt at a reverb.
Both software and hardware instruments have a long history of grabbing off-the-shelf audio dsp algorithms, tweaking them slightly and slapping them on top of synth output to beef up and butter up the sounds.
With a few exceptions (Razor), in the 2020s, these effects are usually worse than what anyone paying for a synth already access to in their DAW. Stock plugins are going to beat out an indie synth’s attempt at compression, limiting, and reverb 99% of the time. When synth makers deliver presets dripping in stock effects, a huge percentage of the sound ends up being these….questionable effects, which ends up making people have to work to remove them.
Of course, we all love effects on synths: filters, reverb, delay, unison, etc. Nothing like a juicy ladder filter, thick swirling unisons or a luscious reverb. They are essentially necessary to get a synth to sound alive, even bigger than life!
Where are the LFOs?
It’s possible that Sine Machine has more LFOs than any other synth in history. Every single harmonic of every single voice has its own independent LFOs for each and every effect.
That being said, you won’t find traditional routable LFOs or modulation matrixes in Sine Machine. You might think you want raw access to those, but trust me when I say juggling tens of thousands of potential sources and destinations stops being music making or even sound design anymore. It’s just brain breaking madness.
Additionally, routable LFO increase flexibility, but they come at a cost. They add indirection, which increases the learning curve. It quickly becomes difficult to reason about and visualize the signal chain.
Other synths do a pretty good job at mitigating this with visualizations etc, but the increase in difficulty tends to divides people into two groups: “clueless preset tinkerers” and “PhD in this particular synth.” Sine Machine is all about building out the middle ground: the broadest possible feature set for the largest number of people.
Designing sounds in Sine Machine is already 3-dimensional (amplitudes, time, harmonic number). That’s already quite a different mental model from wavetable or subtractive synthesis. In some light, this is a disadvantage right out of the gate, as it means we can’t keep layering on more complexity or tossing in features without thinking about how they impact the mental model.
We’ve done our best to group and organize the modulation in Sine Machine to provide a wide palette of options. You can edit the the exact trem rate and depth for harmonic #23. But most of the time you’ll get to have the satisfaction of pushing around the effects in bulk. Hopefully it’s possible to reason about why a sound is a certain way or how to change it to be like something else. In other words, hopefully it’s