Articles
Longer pieces on the ideas inside Laura: fractal oscillators, wavetables, and the choices behind a synth built by one person.
A tempo synced LFO can run at exactly the right speed and still sit in the wrong part of the bar. Here is why an LFO that counts its own way round the cycle drifts off the grid the moment you stop the transport, how phase locking to the song position fixes it, and why very slow modulation needs more numerical care than fast modulation.
A tape stop, a reverse fill and a half time drop are all answers to one question: where should the playhead read from right now? Here is how Laura's Timefold turns that question into a sixteen step pattern, and the delay bug that taught me to move a read head every single sample.
An endless riser is a sixty year old psychoacoustic illusion, not a long automation lane. Here is how the Shepard tone works, the mistake that turns it into a tremolo, and the five ways Laura's new Penrose effect keeps a sound climbing forever.
Laura's newest update pins the fractal oscillator to the boundary of the set, where the sound actually lives, and adds modulators restless enough to walk it: a chaos attractor, a Drift LFO shape, and LFO-to-LFO routing.
The useful test of a synth is how fast you get from an idea to a playable sound. Here is the workflow I use to build a patch in Laura in a couple of minutes: roll it with DICE, drag in the modulation, and finish it with a single macro.
Almost everyone has seen the Mandelbrot set. Far fewer have heard one. Here is an honest answer, and how Laura's fractal oscillators turn six escape-time fractals into sound you can play.