PHASEBURN ONE

A phase-locked loop is a control circuit from radio engineering: an oscillator listens to a reference, measures how far its phase has drifted, and constantly corrects itself. Phaseburn One turns that whole feedback dance into its main voice.

TRACK sets how fast the oscillator chases, DAMP how hard the correction brakes, INFLUENCE how much the reference pulls. Keep the loop tight and it locks — solid, weighty pitch with analog character. Loosen it and the chase itself becomes audible: gliding approach, ringing overshoot, sirens and growls. Push further with BURST and INJECT and it tips into controlled chaos that stays playable, because the loop always wants to come home.

Four phase detectors change the character of the chase — a smooth analog comparator, a hard edge-triggered PFD, a harmonic-locking XOR and a stepped sample-and-hold. MULT and DIV set the tracked ratio — fifths and undertones, not just octaves, and either knob will sweep every ratio in between once you switch its snap off — a three-way color stage adds harmonics, saturation or keytracked fold-back, and a four-knob loop lab bends the servo itself. And PLL REF points the loop at a different reference altogether: another oscillator, or audio from your host.

And because a loop this deep deserves a map: the PLL Lab charts the whole territory. A lock map — drawn from loop theory calibrated against the actual engine, at your patch and your note — shows where the loop locks (labeled with its musical ratio), where it slips into slow sideband beating — the sweet-spot band — and what you can actually hear. The map is a control surface: drag the operating point, snap to ratios like 3:2, ride a tongue boundary, roll the dice inside a region you like — while a strobe wheel spins at the loop's real slip rate, a phase-portrait scope traces its orbit, and one press of MEASURE overlays a genuine probe of your exact settings on the drawn guide.

• TRACK
• DAMP
• INFLUENCE
• CHAOS
• RANGE
• MULT ×1–64
• DIV ÷1–8
• INPUT REF (INT/EXT)
• BURST THR · AMT
• INJECT
• STEP · GRIT
• LAG · RELOCK
• FM · RATIO
• COLOR HARM/SAT/FOLD
• SATURATE · TUBE
• DRIFT · RATE
• PLL LAB

The VECTOR oscillator bends the phase of a waveform around a movable inflection point — two coordinates, X and Y, sweep one cycle from smooth and flute-like to bright and biting without ever swapping waveforms. It builds on vector phase shaping, a published synthesis method (Kleimola, Lazzarini, Timoney & Välimäki, 2011), implemented here in double precision.

A FORMANT mode places the energy on vowel-like peaks, and separate left/right offsets (X∆ / Y∆) run the two channels at the same pitch but diverging shapes — width that comes from the waveform itself, not from a chorus.

• X · Y
• X∆ · Y∆ stereo
• FORMANT mode
• FOLD
• SHAPE
• PI mode

One slider, twelve waveform families: classic shapes, a 7-voice detuned unison saw stack, hard-sync sweeps, additive build-ups to 64 harmonics, staircase shapes, true vowel synthesis (A · E · I · O · U) from a runtime source-filter engine, and a spectral wavetable — swept continuously with click-free, equal-power crossfades between modes.

The band-limited modes (additive, the spectral wavetable) stay clean at any pitch; FOLD and SHAPE push the rest from polite to snarling.

• WAVE
• FOLD
• SHAPE
• STEREO ∆
• FINE
• PI mode

A dedicated sub oscillator below everything else: −3 to 0 octaves, continuously shaped from sine through triangle, saw and square to a narrowing pulse, with its own saturation. Its FX BYPASS switch routes the raw sub around the tone-shaping chain entirely, so the low end stays untouched no matter how hard the rest of the patch is driven.

• OCTAVE −3…0
• SHAPE sin→pulse
• SATURATE
• FX BYPASS