Frequently asked questions

The beta is free and open now — no card required, no sign-up form. Leave your email on the download page and the installer is yours straight away.

There is one build for everyone, and it never stops working. It’s completely free to use until October 15, 2026. After that, if it isn’t activated it simply continues as a demo — fully playable, with a gentle few-second dip roughly every couple of minutes, and you cannot bounce or export usable audio from it: every render carries a soft noise watermark. Register a license at any time — even during the beta — to unlock the full version forever, with no interruptions; sales open October 15, 2026 (€149 one-time).

Yes. Ten beta users of our choosing get the full license free. And if at least one of your submitted presets ships in the factory bank, a solid discount is the least you’ll get. All perks are at our discretion — the beta comes with no guarantees.

Any preset you submit can ship as a factory preset, credited to you — submitting grants us that right and creates no obligation on our side. If at least one of yours ships, a solid discount is the least you’ll get. Picks and perks are at our discretion. Submissions are open until October 7, 2026.

Your own work does. User banks, favorites and your license are files on your machine that an update leaves alone, and a saved project stores the sound itself rather than a pointer to a bank slot. The factory banks are the exception: they ship inside the build and are still being curated, so a new beta build brings a new factory library. If you have built on top of a factory patch, press SAVE and put it in a user bank first — or write it out with EXPORT. Presets & Banks has the detail.

Yes — the demo is simply the same build, unactivated, from October 15, 2026 onward. Everything works, but the demo is for judging the sound, not for producing with: it dips to near-silence for a few seconds roughly every couple of minutes, and you cannot bounce or export usable audio from it — every render carries a soft noise watermark. Activate a license at any point to remove both. During the beta the build is entirely free with neither.

Downloads are open: leave your email on the download page, pick macOS or Windows (we pre-select your platform), and the installer downloads immediately — the install steps also arrive by email. It’s free to use, and a license key can be registered at any time — even before October 15, 2026.

It rolls dice between note lengths, not just on and off. Every one of its 152 slots — across straight, triplet and dotted grids in one bar — carries a chance, and the slots that overlap a moment compete for it in one weighted draw: give the sixteenth on beat one 80% of the moment, the quarter note 10%, the eighth 5%, and the rest is a rest. The winner plays its full length and quiets its rivals, so the line drops, holds and fills the way a player would.

A Strength map ranks every position — downbeat strong, ghosts weak — and the rest of the instrument reads it: each note in the pool can prefer strong or weak beats and long or short notes, the length and position modifiers humanize only where you aim them, the VELOCITY slider hands the map to dynamics, and a NOTE STRENGTH route pushes any parameter harder on the beats that matter. Beat links hang fills off a beat, GENERATE writes a first draft from music-theory rules, and every note the sequencer rolls also leaves the plug-in as MIDI.

Not from held keys — it runs one voice, deliberately, so the engines and the oversampling can spend everything on that voice: denser unison, hotter feedback paths and heavier processing than a polyphonic budget allows.

But the four sources do not have to agree on the note. Arm any of PLL, VECTOR, MORPH and SUB for independence, turn DRIFT up, and the sequencer rolls each armed source its own note of the current scale, per step and by chance. One line becomes stacked intervals, open fifths, whole chords — and because it is the sequencer choosing, the harmony moves rather than sitting still.

Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) synthesis turns a control circuit from radio engineering into a voice: one oscillator constantly chases the pitch of another. Keep the loop tight and it locks into solid, weighty bass with analog character. Loosen it and it hunts, glides and overshoots — sirens, growls and living drones.

The PLL LAB, on the OSC page, makes the loop visible: a computed lock map of where it locks, slips or runs chaotic, with a strobe wheel, phase scope and servo pad reading the loop live. The map is also a control surface — drag it, snap to the musical ratios, and pin sweet spots that save with the preset.

MORPH sweeps twelve waveform families on one slider — detuned unison saws, hard sync, additive, vowels and wavetables — with click-free crossfades.

No AI in the sound. The generative tools — the probability sequencer and GENERATE — run on deterministic music theory: rules you can read and predict.

No. Phaseburn One is built from published research plus our own algorithms, and it emulates nothing. We credit the researchers whose techniques we implement — the character is ours.

Yes — and that is rarer than it sounds. Most synths generate a mono voice and widen it afterwards with chorus, doublers or stereo wideners. Phaseburn One generates left and right independently at the source: the loops run per side, Vector Phase Shaping can diverge the two channels, and the unison stack runs its voices per channel. There is still a chorus — as a choice, not a crutch.

Yes. Phaseburn One takes stereo audio two ways — inserted on a track it arrives on the main input, and it also exposes a stereo sidechain for sends from another track — and the two sum into one patchbay source called AUDIO IN, alongside the oscillators. Cable it into either filter, the granular freezer, the bitcrusher or any other effect and it processes your audio — no note required. It registers as an instrument in every format, so in Logic Pro, where the AU sits in the instrument slot with no track input, the channel strip’s Side Chain menu is the way in.

It can also become the phase-locked loop’s reference: patch AUDIO IN into PLL REF and the oscillator chases your signal. This is not pitch tracking — the note you play still sets where the loop sits, so the incoming audio drags the pitch around rather than dictating it. Feed it drums and the pitch lurches on every hit; play against it and the loop audibly fights.

Yes. Every note the sequencer rolls also leaves the plug-in as MIDI, carrying the velocity the generator gave it — all three plug-in formats send it (VST3, CLAP and AU). Pull Phaseburn One’s own output down and it becomes a pure groove generator for any synth, sampler or drum machine on another track: the same dice, the same Strength map, your instrument’s sound.

It sends one note at a time and only what the sequencer plays — notes you play in are not echoed through. The standalone app has no host to send to, so its hardware MIDI output carries clock and transport only. Host support for plug-in MIDI output varies, so check your host’s routing.

Strong alias suppression, engineered in: a 64-bit floating-point core, built-in oversampling on the stages that need it, and band-limited oscillator modes for clean highs.

VST3 · CLAP on both platforms and AU on macOS, plus a Standalone app if you want to play it without opening a DAW — on macOS 10.14+ (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows 10 21H2 (build 19044) or newer, Windows 11 included, x64. In Logic Pro and GarageBand, Phaseburn One loads as a software instrument.

Any host that loads VST3, CLAP or AU should work — the list is broad. That said, v0.3.0 is early access: if anything behaves oddly in your host, tell us through the contact form.

€149 one-time for a perpetual license, on sale from October 15, 2026. For EU customers, VAT is included in every displayed price. Until then the build is free for everyone, and a license key can be registered at any time.

You activate once with your key — that takes an internet connection for a couple of seconds — and from then on the plugin verifies your license on your own machine, fully offline. No account, no always-online check; it survives updates and keeps working forever, even if our servers ever go away. The license works on up to 3 of your machines at once, and moving to a new machine is self-service on the license page — deactivate the old one to free its slot; as fair use, deactivations are capped at 3 in any rolling 30 days. A license is tied to your email; each activation also records a one-way machine fingerprint (a hash — it can’t be reversed into your hardware), plus the machine’s OS and hostname as a label you can rename or remove on that page. That’s all — no accounts, no tracking.

Click the logo in the plugin, paste your license key and hit Activate — no account needed. On a machine with no internet, expand “No internet on this machine?” in that same panel to reveal its machine code, then open the license page on any other device, unlock it with your license key, paste the code into the offline form and drop the license file it returns onto the plugin panel. Lost your key? Re-send it from the same page.

Cards, processed securely by Paddle — our authorised reseller and Merchant of Record, who also handles VAT.

You can try the full synth before you buy — it’s free until October 15, 2026, and a demo after that: fully playable, but it dips briefly every couple of minutes and you cannot bounce or export usable audio from it, so it is for judging the sound rather than producing with it. Your statutory rights always apply either way — details live on the refunds page.

Through the contact form — a small team reads everything, and you can expect a reply within a few days.

The full manual lives at Documentation — twelve chapters, from Getting Started to a complete parameter reference. The same manual is built into the plugin (the DOCS button, or right-click any control → Open in manual), and you can download it whole as a PDF from the documentation page.