Archive for June, 2025

Excite Audio Intros Motion: Fractal Granular Rhythms


Motion: Fractal is a granular powerhouse for twisting, stretching and scattering sounds.

Motion: Fractal unleashes endless motion, texture, and modern sonic transformation through dual granular engines, a reactive trance gate, and stutter-repeat effects.

Excite Audio is the brand behind a rapidly expanding stable of plugins that includes Lifeline Console and Lifeline Expanse, along with the more recent Motion series, a trio of processors designed to add movement to audio.

The company’s latest release is Motion: Fractal, a granular multi-effects plugin that Excite Audio says will enhance static sounds, sculpt hypnotic rhythms and twist, stretch and scatter any signal, offering tons of potential for creative sound design.

Fractal is equipped with five individual effects modules that can be reordered in the plugin’s routing section: there’s a dual-layer granular engine, a trance gate effect, a beat repeat module and a hall reverb.

Fractal’s granular engine captures audio and slices it into tiny grains to create evolving textures; grains can be filtered, panned, reversed and pitch-shifted, and there are three unique playhead modes onboard that adjust the position in an incoming signal that the grains are sliced from.

Fractal’s Repeat and Gate modules introduce a rhythmic effect to a signal: Gate drops out audio during chosen steps in its tempo-synced, 32-step sequence, while Repeat produces a glitchy stutter effect by repeating slices of the incoming signal. These are joined by Space, a basic reverb with length and mix controls.

These can be manipulated via Fractal’s hexagonal controller, a kind of XY pad that can be used to assign up to six macros and morph between them using your cursor. You’re also able to draw and record custom paths for the cursor to follow which can then be replayed as modulation.

Drag-and-dropping a parameter to the hexagon will hook it up to Fractal’s envelope follower, which modulates the parameter in response to the amplitude of the incoming audio.

Dive deep into Motion: Fractal video:

It runs on macOS and Windows and is available in VST/VST3/AU/AAX formats, or a standalone app.

Motion: Fractal is currently available at a discounted price of $52.49/£39/€46.26 and there’s a Lite version on offer with a reduced feature set for only $33.65/£25.00/€29.65

Find out more on the Excite Audio site.

 

Physical Modeling Synthesis With Yamaha VL1


Producer and synthfluencer Doctor Mix (Claudio Passavanti) has launched a new video series, exploring physical modeling synthesis.

In the video, he takes a look at the pioneering Yamaha VL1, a flagship synth from the ’90s that’s based on physical modeling.

The VL1 blurs the line between ‘synth sounds’ and acoustic instruments. It can create performances that sound surprisingly realistic, but also lets you get into more ‘synthy’ territory.

Along the way, Passavanti looks at how he upgraded his VL1 with a USB floppy emulator drive, talks with VL1 developer and sound designer Manny Fernandez and demonstrates some of his custom sounds.

 

Live Analog Berlin School Eurorack Synth Jam


Eurorack synth maker AJH Synths shared this extended Berlin School style synth jam, a studio recording of their performance from Superbooth 2025.

“This is a re-recording of a 20-minute live set by ?@DreamsOfWires? for Superbooth25, and consists of two old tracks from my video back-catalog,” they note. “It’s quite a minimal rig, configured as two all-analogue synth voices – one for melodic patterns, one for pitched drone parts.”

Here’s what they shared about the technical details:

Modules used:

(AJH SYNTH)
Matrix VCF
Transistor Ladder Filter
Sonic XV Diode Ladder Filter
Vintage Transistor Core VCO x4
Sample Hold & Slew
Contour Generators
Wave Swarm
Ring SM
Muting Mixer
Discrete Cascaded VCA
Glide + Noise MkII
Dual LFO VCA

(Other brands)
Squarp Hermod+ sequencer
XAOC Devices Sarajewo analog delay
ALM Busy Circuits MFX for reverb
Cosmotronic Cosmix
Happy Nerding Isolator
Homemade case powered by Konstant Lab BoardPWR