Coming soon

Nature Spark

The whole vocal chain in one window, and seven thousand years of singing to dress it in.

Nature Spark is a whole vocal chain in one window: gate, level rider, tuning, de-esser, tone, resonance smoothing, two compressors, colour, doubling, echo, space and limiter, in that order. Along the top runs a line of fifteen ages, from a voice in a painted cave seven thousand years ago to today and beyond; choosing one dresses the voice in what carried it then and where it stood.

42: patches

See it up close

For Mixing a lead or backing vocal from raw recording to finished, and giving a voice the sound of another time, without building a chain of separate plugins.

One listening stage (pitch, sung or not, how much hiss) feeds every other: the tuner leaves breaths and consonants alone, the de-esser judges by balance and not by level, the gate never closes on a sung note, the rider waits while nobody sings, and echo and space step back under the words and come up in the gaps.
The ages: painted cave, stone temple, amphitheatre, cathedral, opera house, acoustic horn, ribbon microphone, tape slapback, plate and chamber, the console, digital halls, gloss, tuned, now, and one that is not of this world. Each sets the carrier (horn, ribbon, valve, tape, console, early digital, radio), the space and what was done to a voice then, and leaves your cleaning-up as it is.
Twelve spaces built on sixteen delay lines that feed one another, from a room to a cathedral that rings for eight seconds, a gated space and a shimmer that climbs an octave as it fades.
Listen and set: it listens for six seconds, then sets the low cut under the lowest note, the level, the rider, the compressors and the de-esser for that voice, tells you what it heard and what it did, and can put everything back.
Every stage that takes something away can be heard alone, and draws what it removes on the live spectrum. The Spark knob scales the whole chain from the plain voice to half as much again.
42 singer patches across the ages and today’s styles. Their notes say what family of sound they follow; none claims the sound of a particular record.
This is a concept preview running in the browser on a synthetic singer; it has not been judged by ear on real voices yet. The tuner moves formants with the pitch (fine for correction, audible on big transpositions). The VST3 is not built.

Status Concept preview (browser). VST3 not built yet
Stages Fifteen, in a fixed order
Ages Fifteen, 5000 BC to beyond
Patches 42
Delay None with the tuner, smoothing, colour and limiter off; each says what it adds

On its way