An effects rack by Lost Synapse · a one-person studio
The complete effects section of my synth, extracted into a single plugin. Seventeen devices, one drag-to-reorder chain, four macros you wire by dragging them onto knobs. Put it on drums, vocals, guitars, or somebody else's synth.
Own Laura? Laura FX is already yours. How it works →
Proven inside Laura first. Every device shipped, bug-fixed, and tuned in a real instrument before it became a plugin of its own.
Seventeen devices
The rack holds twelve slots. Drag any device in, drag to reorder, and the chain follows without clicks. These are the seventeen to pick from.
An infinity engine. Three voices ride one slow lap and hand off where your ear cannot hear the seam, so the motion never resets: a barber-pole phaser, a tape Doppler riser, a pulse that keeps accelerating, an inharmonic siren, or a resonant peak that climbs forever. Locks to the bar, runs in reverse.
A glitch resequencer on the grid. It keeps a rolling recording of the last couple of seconds and runs a sixteen step pattern across the bar: leave a step alone and you hear the live signal, program one and it re reads what just went past as a stutter, a reversal, a tape stop, a half or double speed splice, or a downward glide. Nothing is generated, so it always sounds like your own material folded back on itself.
A flock of starlings as a delay. Every bird is a tap drifting through delay time and stereo pan, transients spook the flock, and the echoes wheel and regroup. The rhythm is emergent, never a grid.
A spectral fluid. The spectrum of your audio becomes a simulation with drag, turbulence, and buoyancy, and energy flows through the sound like weather.
Capture and hold. Grab a slice of whatever is playing and sustain it as a drone for as long as you like, then glide back to live audio.
A Bode-style frequency shifter. Every partial moves by the same amount of Hz, so harmonic relationships melt into inharmonic shimmer and barber-pole motion.
Sprays randomized grains from the recent past, each with its own position and pitch. Enough grains and anything becomes a slowly evolving pad.
A network of coupled, tuned resonators. Feed it drums and it rings like a struck body; feed it pads and it blooms.
A character compressor with lookahead, program-dependent Pump, a Spectral mode, and Bloom and Drift sections that let it breathe like hardware.
Cut the chain into two bands, three bands, or mid and side. One band rides through the rest of the rack, the others wait and sum back in at the end.
Multi-algorithm delay, from clean digital through tape wobble to Smear, the diffuse wash the rack is known for.
Rooms, halls, and shimmering cathedrals, plus convolution with your own impulse responses.
Multiple drive characters with a built-in filter section, from warm tube push to full wavefolding.
A parametric EQ with a live analyzer, for carving space before or after the weirder devices.
Wide, dense stereo chorus that stays stable in mono.
From subtle jet swirl to metallic comb screams.
A smooth multi-stage phaser with tempo sync.
Macros
Grab a macro badge, drop it on any knob in any device, set the depth. Done. One macro can pull reverb size up while it pushes delay feedback down and opens the distortion, so a whole scene lives on one knob. Macros are plain host parameters too, so automation lanes and MIDI mapping in your DAW just work.
Honest A/B
The BYPASS button keeps the dry signal sample-aligned with the processed one, so toggling it compares the sound itself instead of a timing offset. Tails keep ringing underneath and fade back in without a click. It also drives your host's own bypass control, so automation works either way.
Chains switch the same way presets do in Laura: a short crossfade instead of a pop, even mid-note, even with feedback devices running.
23 factory chains
Vocal halls, dub throws, shimmer cathedrals, granular hazes, pumping bus glue, telephone lo-fi, a macro rack with all four knobs pre-wired. Load one, hear it on your material, then tear it apart. Your own chains save to a plain folder you can back up or share.
Already own Laura?
Laura FX is included with Laura, permanently. Install it on a machine where Laura is activated and it unlocks itself, no new license, no account, nothing to type. I built the rack inside Laura first, and I'm not going to charge Laura owners twice for the same code.
Don't own either yet? Laura is $69 and includes the entire synth plus Laura FX. Buying the synth is the better deal if you want both.
Frequently asked
No. Laura FX is a standalone product. It is the effects section of my synth Laura, extracted into its own audio effect plugin, and it runs on any track in any host that loads AU, VST3, or CLAP plugins.
No. Your Laura license unlocks Laura FX. Install Laura FX on a machine where Laura is activated and it picks the license up automatically, no extra steps. If Laura is not activated there yet, drop the same .lic file onto the Laura FX window.
Buying Laura later gets you a Laura license, which unlocks both products. The Laura FX license on its own unlocks Laura FX only, so if you think you'll want the whole synth, buying Laura directly is the better deal: it includes everything Laura FX does.
AU, VST3, CLAP, and a Standalone app that processes live input, on macOS and Windows, all in one purchase. In Logic it registers as a regular Audio FX insert, so it works on any audio, instrument, or bus channel.
The same code. Both products compile from one shared effects codebase and release together with the same version number. When I improve a device or add a new one, the update ships to Laura and Laura FX at the same time, free in both.
Yes, same policy as Laura: everything works for 30 minutes per session, then a quiet noise burst every 30 seconds until you activate. No account needed.
A small fixed lookahead for the compressor, reported to your host so everything stays aligned automatically. The built-in bypass is latency-matched too, so A/B comparisons are sample-accurate and honest.
No. One-time purchase, lifetime license, lifetime updates. The license verifies offline and there is no telemetry.
Yes. There is a 14-day refund policy. Reply to the license email and the refund is processed without a form.
Launch pricing
Laura FX shares its code with Laura and releases in lockstep. Every new device, every DSP refinement, every fix lands in both products on the same day, free.
USD · one-time · lifetime license