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Four engines, drawn together +
Wavetable, FM, classic analog (saw, square, triangle, sine, pulse), and fractal oscillators (Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship, Tricorn, Multibrot, Newton), paired across two oscillator slots with full per-voice routing. Switch engines without losing your patch.
Mycelium: voices that couple New +
A shared reaction-diffusion field behind the synth, the first place in Laura where the voices in a chord affect each other. Notes feed it and read it; one note's chemistry spreads into where another is reading, so a tight chord grows into itself and a wide one stays clean. Four per-voice sources (Value, two gradients, and Flow) carry it into the rest of the patch.
MPE, per note New +
Any MPE controller, a Seaboard, a LinnStrument, a Push, or anything else that sends MPE. Every note carries its own pitch bend, pressure, and slide, each routed to the right voice. Pressure, Mod Wheel, and Timbre are modulation sources on any keyboard. Switch MPE on in the gear menu or on the VOICE panel; it sticks across presets and follows your controller's own setup. Per note on polyphonic patches.
Preset Browser with search, tags, and categories New +
Full-bleed browser with a category sidebar, search across name and tag, and 16 character-axis tag chips (acid, ambient, bright, dark, evolving, gritty, infinite, lush, vintage, warm and more), plus a NEW chip that collects the latest release's patches. Chips that have no matches grey out and slide right so the useful ones are always at hand. All 309 factory presets get tags at startup.
Sequencer beyond the grid New +
Four modes on one engine. Geometric: notes ride a 2D shape with per-step velocity, gate, probability, and two assignable mod lanes. Galaxy: bouncing-ball physics fires nodes as balls cross them. Constellation: orbital attractors with gravitational coupling, plus wormhole portals you place on the canvas. Arp: hold a chord and the keys become a tempo-synced arpeggio, with a generative Drift order that walks through the chord on its own. Conditional triggers, fractal sub-step nodes, four pattern slots with crossfade morph, eight feel presets with per-click variation. And with Spores on, the pattern feeds the Mycelium field where each node sits, and FIELD+ or FIELD- steps fire only where the field is alive or where it has died back, so the pattern thins where it plays hard and fills back in as the field settles.
Character compressor New +
Classic dynamics stage on the left, four optional character sections stacked on the right: Bloom (parallel resonant band that breathes with the gain reduction), Drift (smooth random walk on threshold and timing), Pump (internal sidechain LFO, free Hz or beat-synced), Spectral (2-band or 3-band LR4 split). Harmonics saturator wakes up when the compressor pumps.
Plays without a DAW New +
Laura ships a Standalone app alongside the AU, VST3, and CLAP plugins. Open it from /Applications on macOS or Program Files on Windows, pick an audio device and a MIDI input, and play. Same engines, same FX rack, same sequencer, same presets, just running on its own.
Draw your own envelopes and LFOs +
Every modulator slot in Laura, all three envelopes and all four LFOs, can flip to a multi segment user drawn curve. Per segment tension, step nodes, loop and sustain markers, tempo sync. The shape you draw is the shape that plays.
Synapse: a filter that sings New +
Laura's signature filter type with always-on warmth, drive-mode-shaped resonance, and a Sing knob that folds the resonance peak into a vocal bloom. Ten drive characters, and the resonance takes on the shape of whichever one you pick. I haven't heard another filter quite like it.
Filter+ with a live response curve +
Pre-filter drive (ten characters), series HP, A/B compare on the drive stage, resonance compensation, audio-rate filter FM, per-voice cutoff jitter, stereo cutoff offset, and a live curve display. Enough controls here to build a patch out of the filter alone.
An eighteen-module FX rack +
Chorus, delay, distortion, phaser, flanger, the Penrose infinity engine, and eleven more. Sensible amounts by default, more on tap when you want it. The DICE button rolls a curated rack alongside the patch, so a sketch is one click away.
Convolution reverb, with your IRs +
Drop your own impulse responses. Embed them in the preset. Take them with you. No third-party engine to license.
Any tuning, not just twelve notes +
Laura is an MTS-ESP client. Put a tuning master in the session and the whole instrument follows it: 22edo, just intonation, your own Scala file. No routing and no files to import here. Held notes retune as the scale changes under them, the footer names the scale that is playing, and on an MPE rig the tuning is kept per note, so a chord can hold two scales at once.
Global tuning, for the 442 crowd New +
A concert-A reference sits in the bottom bar, next to the CPU readout. Leave it at 440, nudge it to 442 or 443, or drop to 432. Pick a value from the list or type your own. It retunes the whole instrument at once, both oscillators, the sub, and the resonator, and it saves with the patch, so a session that lives at 442 stays at 442.
A chaos attractor in the mod row New +
Three coupled values orbiting a strange attractor: Lorenz, Rossler, or Thomas, your pick. It sits at the end of the LFO row with a small window drawing the orbit live. An LFO loops. Random steps. This one wanders, and it never repeats itself. Its X, Y, and Z channels are ordinary mod sources: drag a badge onto any knob, or route them from the matrix and let the orbit walk the fractal's coordinates while you play.
Read mode: three ways to hear a fractal New +
A fractal oscillator used to turn its slice into sound one way: the brightness around the sampling circle was the waveform, and that leans toward a spiky, buzzy tone. Read mode adds two more. Spectral uses the brightness as the level of each harmonic, so the edges of the set become formant peaks that drift as the circle moves. Phase uses the slice to bend the phase of a sine, like an FM operator, with a whole-number Ratio and a Tone knob that runs from warmer and rounder to brassy feedback. Amount and Tone are mod targets, so an LFO or a macro can move them while you hold a note.
Boundary lock: play the fractal's edge New +
Everything interesting in an escape-time fractal happens at the boundary of the set, and the sampling circle used to cross it at only a couple of points. Boundary lock finds the edge and stays on it. Lock anchors the sampling to a point on the edge you choose; Trace goes further and reads the waveform along the edge itself. The position along the edge is a mod target, so a slow LFO or the chaos attractor can stroll the coastline of the Mandelbrot set while you hold a note.
309 factory presets, loudness-matched +
Switching presets used to swing perceived loudness by 16 LU between a sub patch and a resonant lead. Every factory preset is now offline-rendered, measured against -20 LUFS-I, and master-gain calibrated to land within a half-LU window. You can page through the library without riding a fader.
Signed installers, both platforms New +
macOS .pkg is signed with my Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple. Windows VST3 and Standalone are signed via Microsoft Trusted Signing. macOS opens the installer without a Gatekeeper warning, Windows SmartScreen doesn't flag it. No right-click trick on first launch.
Lifetime license, no strings +
Buy it once. No subscription, no telemetry, no cloud. The license verifies offline, so Laura runs fine on a machine that never goes online. Your saves are your saves.
