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!
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 2025, these built-in effects are often not quite as good as what people already have access to in their DAW. When synth makers deliver presets dripping in stock effects, a big percentage of the sound ends up being these effects which people have to work to remove from the patch.
Where are the routable LFOs?
Sine Machine might more LFOs than any other synth in history. Every single harmonic of every single voice has its own independent LFOs for pitch and volume. That’s more than 20k LFOs.
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 juggling tens of thousands of potential sources and destinations stops being music making or even sound design anymore. It’s just laborious data entry.
Additionally, routable LFOs increase flexibility 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 (visualizations, etc), but the increase in difficulty tends to divide people into two groups: “casual preset browsers” and “PhD in this particular synth.” Sine Machine tries to build 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 volume and decay rate for harmonic #23. But most of the time you’ll get to enjoy the satisfaction of pushing around the effects in bulk. And hopefully still reason about why a sound is a certain way or how to change it to be like something else without needing to invest too many hours.
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