Tessera Sequenced Resonator vs Sightlines

Tessera is a tuned resonator. Play a drum loop, a guitar, a vocal, or a field recording into it, and it blooms that sound into twelve pitched voices that ring, shimmer, and decay in tune. At its core are twelve parallel resonators, each locked to a note of a chord or scale you choose. Whatever you feed them excites those voices, so a single hit becomes a lush chord, a sustained pad, or a slowly evolving cloud. Pick a root and a scale, from majors and minors through ninths, elevenths, whole tone, and chromatic, and the whole instrument retunes at once. Choose from eleven resonator models: plucked strings, struck bells, singing bowls, glass, membranes, tuned bars, plates, and hollow tubes. Shape each one with decay, damping, brightness, and stereo spread, moving from tight and percussive to vast and cathedral-like. Five motion engines decide how the voices arrive: Contour spreads them into shimmering, arpeggiated waves. SEQ steps each voice through its own rhythmic pattern. Strum rakes across the chord like fingers on strings. Arp cycles the voices one note at a time. Swarm lets them weave and drift around a moving center. Any of it can lock to your host tempo, so rhythmic patches stay in time. Play Tessera three ways: leave MIDI off and let the resonators sound on their own tuning, key them live from a keyboard, or gate them with held chords. Balance the effect with the dry and wet mix, blur the tails with the diffusion stage, and add motion with the built-in vibrato LFO. Microtonal tunings are supported for the pitch-obsessed. One hundred factory presets get you going, from plucks and drones to bells, rhythmic sequences, strummed chords, arpeggios, and dark cinematic textures. Tessera runs as an AUv3 plug-in inside your favorite host, and as a standalone app.

Make noise, texture, and percussion sing. Add motion and stereo spread to basic sounds. Load samples and sculpt them endlessly. Leave your mark on any sound with harmonic filtering. Sightlines is a playable harmonic filter. Built from a collection of resonant bandpass filters tuned to the harmonic series, designed to bring out a customizable set of musical frequencies in any sound. Tune it to a fixed frequency like a resonator, or send it MIDI to make it come alive as an instrument. Sightlines can be loaded as an instrument or an audio effect. As an instrument, use it with samples, noise, or oscillators to construct sounds never heard before. As an effect, add movement and interest to any sound, and even impart tonality onto unpitched input. SOUND SOURCES • Noise – filter variable color noise and random noise bursts for Sightlines’ simplest and quickest output. • Samples – send samples through resonant filters as one-shots or infinite looping versions of themselves, great for found sound and tonal samples alike. • Synth – skip the filters entirely and use Sightlines as a harmonic synth, where you can customize and modulate the proportion of each harmonic in the signal. • Audio effect – use Sightlines as an audio effect on any track. MOVEMENT AND EFFECTS • Manipulate overtones – stretch, bend, and reimagine the harmonic series to retune Sightlines’ output into realistic or indescribable sonic spaces. • Quantize frequencies – snap all of Sightlines’ filters to a scale, to impart that key quality onto any sound. • Balance bands – maneuver through the harmonic space by scanning, tilting, or spreading Sightlines’ bands. • End of chain – make your output shine with a built-in chorus, BBD-style delay, and reverb. FEATURES • Modulation – modify any control in Sightlines with multiple LFOs, sequencers, smooth random sources, and performance effects. • Presets – full preset control over every parameter in Sightlines. Cross-platform preset format for sharing with friends. • Waymaker – connect to Sightlines’ sibling application, Waymaker, for direct sequencing of Sightlines’ without MIDI routing. Also available for macOS and Windows in VST3 / AU / AAX formats from Aqeel Aadam Sound.