Phaseburn One 1.0 is out, and here is what comes next
Phaseburn One 1.0 shipped on 15 October. If you were on the beta, this is the build you were waiting for. If you are reading about the instrument for the first time, this is the first version I would hand to anyone without a caveat attached.
This post is the long version of the short mail some of you already got: what 1.0 is, who made it that way, and what happens next.
What 1.0 is
The finished instrument. Every factory slot holds a finished sound now: 256 presets across eight banks, from playable instruments, sequenced phrases and grooves to one-shots, basses and leads, pads and textures. A fresh instance starts on a new INIT patch, a plain Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) voice that sounds the key you play, with every module parked so that switching one on is musical at once.
And the engine had a last careful round. Much of it came straight from the beta: things you reported with exact steps, things you asked for in long emails about one knob. A modulation route to a macro dial now plays the moment you make it instead of waiting for the dial to be touched. The first note after loading a project sounds like every note after it. Transient hits play out instead of retiring on the first sample. FM WIDTH widens both sides evenly. On the macOS standalone, switching the audio output moves the sound there and only there. The full list is in the release notes.
If you still run a beta build, install 1.0 over it. Your user banks, favorites and license carry over. One thing first: installing replaces the factory banks with the new set, so if you built on top of a factory patch, save it into a USER bank before you update.
Thank you, beta
The beta ran from early August to mid-October. I expected a few dozen people and some crash reports. What arrived instead was patient, detailed and generous, and it made the instrument better than I could have alone.
When the beta opened I promised a license to the ten people who helped most. In the end every active participant got one, free, and that is far more than ten. The line between “active” and “very active” turned out to be impossible to draw honestly, so I did not draw it.
Everyone else who played the beta has a thank-you waiting at the checkout: a launch discount, applied automatically when you buy with the email address you used during the beta. There is no code to enter and nothing to claim. The same goes for everyone who was on this newsletter before launch: you were here early too. It runs until 31 October 2026, and then it is gone. The checkout takes card, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay, plus local methods in some countries.
More good presets than slots
Here is a problem I am glad to have. The factory banks hold 256 sounds, and you sent more good presets than that. Choosing was the hardest part of shipping 1.0, and some sounds I would happily have shipped are sitting in a folder on my desk, waiting.
So submissions stay open, for good. There is no deadline, and I will not promise anything in return, because a promise is the quickest way to turn a gift into a transaction. What I can tell you is what happens to the best of what arrives: it fills the next factory banks and the free downloadable banks below, credited to its author by name. The preset browser’s EXPORT and EXPORT BANK write exactly the files the submission page takes: one preset, a whole 32-slot bank, or several of either.
What comes next
Two updates, each its own release.
More room. A future update raises the factory banks and the user banks to 512 slots each, double what 1.0 has. The factory side so that the presets that deserve a slot get one. The user side because some of you send forty presets at a time and clearly need it.
Free downloadable banks. The best of the submitted presets, gathered into banks you can download and import, free, for everyone. A bank is only good when it plays as a bank: levelled so nothing jumps out, named so you know what you are flipping through, with nothing in it that is almost a copy of its neighbour. That curation is slow work when it is done properly, which is why it gets its own update rather than riding along with the slots.
No dates on either. You will read about both here first.
If you only want to hear it
The demo is on the download page: the full instrument, every parameter, every preset and every effect. It is the same build a buyer runs, only not registered. Until it is, the sound dips to near-silence for a few seconds every couple of minutes, and anything you bounce or export carries a soft noise watermark. Enough to judge the sound by ear, not enough to produce with. Register a license and both are gone, no reinstall.
That is 1.0. Thank you for getting it here. Now go make something with it, and when a sound comes out that you would want to find in a bank, send it over.