Four sources, one voice
The voice is a Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) — a control circuit from radio engineering, turned into an oscillator that has to chase every note. Beside it sit VECTOR, MORPH and a sub, summed into one voice by design, with width built at the point of generation by the three pitched sources. One voice — and still chords, rolled by chance through OSC DRIFT.
The loop is the voice
An oscillator that listens to a reference, measures how far its phase has drifted, and constantly corrects itself. Phaseburn One turns that chase into sound.
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 — a gliding approach, ringing overshoot, sirens and growls.
The circuit was built to hide its error. The error is the interesting part.
Four dials to play it
The PLL opens on the MACRO lens. Your sound lives at twelve o’clock; nothing changes until you turn a dial.
GRIP is how hard the loop holds the note. FIGHT is how much is thrown at it. COLOR is the coloration stage as one travel. WIDTH is how far apart the two loops are tempered. MULTIPLIER sits beside them, because the ratio is a musical choice rather than a character.
Each dial is a single path through the loop, tuned by ear, with named landmarks along the way, and every one opens on HOME — your own patch, exactly as saved. Nothing is hidden: ADVANCED shows the full panel, unchanged, and touching any knob a macro owns hands the patch straight back to you.
Push it
Under ADVANCED the loop is the stock circuit with its four defects on knobs — all at zero until you ask.
MULT and DIV set the ratio the loop chases — note × MULT ÷ DIV — so it reaches fifths, twelfths and undertones, and either knob sweeps every ratio in between once its snap is off. Four phase detectors change the character of the chase: a smooth analog comparator, a hard edge-triggered detector, a harmonic-locking XOR and a stepped sample-and-hold.
BURST and INJECT tip it into controlled chaos that stays playable, because the loop always wants to come home; CHAOS walks it to the edge of lock. And the loop lab — STEP, GRIT, LAG, RELOCK — is four defects of real hardware loops, each a modulation destination.
- MULT · DIV
- DIV LOCK
- PD · EDGE · XOR · S&H
- BURST
- INJECT
- CHAOS
- STEP
- GRIT
- LAG
- RELOCK
- HARM · SAT · FOLD
- TUBE
- DRIFT · RATE
See the loop
The PLL LAB flips the OSC page into a live chart of the loop itself — and the chart is a control surface.
A computed lock map shows where the loop locks, slips or runs chaotic at the current settings. A strobe wheel freezes when it locks and turns when it slips; a phase-error scope and a servo pad read the loop as it breathes.
Drag the operating point and MULT and INFLUENCE move as real host gestures. MAGNET gently pulls the drag toward the musical ratios, and up to eight PINS bookmark sweet spots that save with the preset.
Lock it to something else
PLL REF takes every output on the panel — any oscillator, the mix, any effect, a feedback tap, or your own audio.
Patch MORPH into PLL REF for cross-modulation with no host routing at all. Patch a drum loop or a vocal in through AUDIO IN and the loop chases that instead. This is not pitch tracking: the note you play still sets where the loop sits, and the incoming signal drags it around — feed it drums and the pitch lurches on every hit.
GAIN and its one-shot AUTO land the reference at the level the comparator wants. Silence on AUDIO IN closes the oscillator instead of leaving a drone.
The sculptor, the palette, the foundation
Three more sources into the same voice, each with a job the loop does not do.
VECTOR bends the phase of a waveform around a movable inflection point: X and Y sweep one cycle from smooth and flute-like to bright and biting without swapping waveforms — vector phase shaping, after Kleimola, Lazzarini, Timoney and Välimäki (2011). FORMANT places the energy on vowel-like peaks; X∆ and Y∆ run the two channels at the same pitch with diverging shapes.
MORPH sweeps twelve waveform families on one knob — classic shapes, a seven-voice detuned unison saw stack per channel, hard sync, additive build-ups to 64 harmonics, staircase shapes, source-filter vowels with BREATH and SIZE, a spectral wavetable — with click-free crossfades. The band-limited modes stay clean at any pitch.
The sub sits −3 to 0 octaves below, shaped from sine through triangle, saw and square to a narrowing pulse, with SATURATE for weight and an FX BYPASS that routes it around the whole rack, so the low end stays untouched however hard the rest is driven.
Width, built at the source
The three pitched sources generate left and right independently, so width is built at the point of generation.
The PLL runs two complete, independent loops, tempered apart by WIDTH. VECTOR runs X∆ and Y∆. MORPH’s unison stack runs its voices per channel. The filter adds STEREO SEP. Width comes from the waveform itself and moves with the sound, instead of being pasted on at the end.
The sub is the exception: mono, feeding both channels equally, which keeps the low end centered — and MONO BASS in the master section anchors it. There is still a chorus, as a color, not a repair.
One voice — and chords, by chance
Every cycle of the engine goes into one voice. OSC INDEPENDENCE lets the four sources disagree about the note.
On the Notes tab, OSC INDEPENDENCE has four target switches and two knobs. SKIP is a per-note chance that a source sits a note out. DRIFT is a per-note chance that it plays a different note from the sequencer’s pool, with the same chance-and-strength weighting the pool always uses.
Arm PLL, VECTOR and MORPH, protect the sub, and one line stacks intervals, open fifths, whole chords — harmony that moves, because the sequencer is choosing. The bar preview draws the rolled bar before you hear it, and marks each drifted note the moment it fires. Switch SEQ off and every oscillator sounds the note you sent.
Read the chapters
Every claim on this page traces to the manual — the same manual that ships inside the plugin.
Play it before it costs anything
Free and open — no card required. It’s free to use until October 15, 2026, then keeps working as a demo until you register a perpetual, DRM-free license (any time); ten beta users we pick get the full license free, and submitted presets can ship in the factory bank, credited to their authors.
Free €149 one-time at launch
Perks and preset picks are at our discretion — the beta comes with no guarantees