vxn-1c

Sound examples

Hear it

Ravel — Jeux d’eau

Performed by VXN1b, vxn-1c’s predecessor, from Bernd Krueger’s arrangement of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Rendered through the synth and trimmed; this recording is shared under the same licence.

Mussorgsky — Pictures at an Exhibition: Promenade

Performed by VXN1b, vxn-1c’s predecessor, from Bernd Krueger’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Rendered through the synth and trimmed; this recording is shared under the same licence.

vxn-1c is a dual-layer subtractive polysynth and the successor to VXN1b. It plays VXN1b’s sounds through a new faceplate, with a new chorus, cleaner oscillators and filter, an arpeggiator on each layer, and a RANDOM button that builds a new sound in one of eleven styles. It is coming as a CLAP plugin for macOS and Windows, with VST3 to follow, and you can play it now in your browser: the web build is the same engine and the same faceplate, compiled to WebAssembly.

A patch is two complete instruments, Layer 1 and Layer 2, sharing one set of effects. Layer 2 doubles Layer 1 on every note or takes the keys below a split point — a pad under a lead, a bass under an arpeggio, or a sound thickened by a detuned copy of itself.

No modulation route is hard-wired: every modulatable parameter is assignable from every modulation source.

The voice

Oscillators. Two, with variable pulse width, plus a sub and a noise source. Hard sync, FM and two kinds of ring modulation are available as cross-modulation modes between the pair.
Filter. A 4-pole zero-delay ladder — low-pass, high-pass, band-pass or notch, 12 or 24 dB/octave — with drive and self-oscillating resonance. A gentle high-pass on each layer’s sum keeps its low end in check.
Envelopes and LFOs. Two ADSRs, linear or exponential, and two LFOs per layer; LFO 1 has a delayed fade-in.
Arpeggiator. One per layer, so a split can arpeggiate one side and hold the other: up, down, up/down, random or as played, over one to four octaves, synced to the host’s tempo, with gate, swing and hold.

Voice stacking

Each layer is 32-note polyphonic, or stacks voices: 16 doubled, 8 quadrupled, and so on to all 32 in unison on one note.

Within a stack, voices are detuned and phased, fanning them out in pitch and start phase, spaced evenly, geometrically or at random. A routable spread source can be applied to anything a voice has, from pan to pulse width or cross-modulation depth.

The modulation matrix

Sixteen slots per layer, each routing a source through a depth and a curve to a destination, optionally scaled by a second source: envelopes, LFOs, velocity, key, the wheels, aftertouch, a per-note random value and a stack’s spread and position, into pitch, pulse width, cross modulation, cutoff and resonance, amplitude, pan, LFO 1’s rate and the envelopes’ times and sustain.

Effects

Dynamics, a bucket-brigade chorus, phaser, tempo-syncable delay and reverb, then a limiter. QUALITY sets how far the voices are oversampled: Standard for everyday playing, High for the cleanest top end.

Presets

A factory bank of over fifty presets, including VXN1b’s converted bank and the manual’s worked examples. The manual describes every control, with graphs measured from the synth’s own code.

Still deciding?

The whole synth runs in the tab. Every control, every preset, the same sound the plugin makes — and nothing to uninstall afterwards.

Launch the web synth