StarChild

TL;DW: A weird digital ambience!

StarChild

For all that we try to make plugins have natural, acoustic or electric, retro vibe qualities, sometimes there’s a thing which breaks the rules by creating a distinctive voice that has nothing to do with naturalness. I’ve got an old Alesis reverb like that: very primitive, but deep as anything. There have always been odd little boxes with a style all their own, like the Delta Labs Effectron, which is low-fi but uses delta-sigma modulation like an SACD (but much more crudely!)

In that spirit, here’s StarChild. The inspiration came from the old Ursa Major Space Station. That said, StarChild sounds nothing like a Space Station, but it does sound like it’s out of this world. Like Space Station, it produces series of echo taps which aren’t perfectly regular. Space Station has little rhythms that it does, while StarChild works on prime number sequences: that produces a sputtery sort of delay line in which it won’t reinforce any one frequency.

What you get is a curious delay/ambience effect, in stereo (it’ll widen stuff that’s only in the middle). It can work kind of like a natural ambience that’s a room in a horrible shape, or you can crank out the duration and get weird stretched textures with a variety of granularity. It’s an odd little plugin: didn’t sell that well in its earlier incarnation, yet this revised newer form is hotly anticipated: a bunch of people really started wanting it when Kagi (my payment processor) went out of business and suddenly it couldn’t be sold.

Now that doesn’t matter, because I’m using my Patreon to live on (granted, it’s sort of crisis mode but it will grow in time) and the plugins are being given away for free. I hope you enjoy it. If the Patreon reaches $800 a month, I will begin open sourcing the plugins one by one, and StarChild could be one of those plugins. (Please, stay within an order of magnitude or so of the $1-$2 that the Patreon is designed to ask: I have no wish to depend on individuals giving… or withholding… vast sums just by themselves)

I hope you like StarChild. I know quite a few people who eagerly awaited this one.