Highlights
- Murmuration, the fifteenth effect in the rack. It's a delay made of a flock of birds, where each bird is one echo. Where a bird sits sets its delay time and its pan, and how crowded it is sets how loud it is. The flock circles a roost point you place on the delay and moves the way a real flock does, pulling toward the group and keeping its distance.
- Play a note with an attack and the flock scatters, then settles back. So a pluck or a stab bursts into a cloud of echoes that fan out and regroup, and it never lands the same way twice. Eight knobs run it: Flock size, Cohesion, Separation, Spook (how easily a transient scatters them), Roost, Spread, Feedback, and Dry/Wet. Three presets come with it: Starling Drift, Scatter Lead, and Void Flock.
- An arpeggiator, as a new mode on the sequencer. Hold a chord and it plays the notes back in time with your track. The usual orders are there, Up, Down, Up-Down, Down-Up, As Played, Random, and Chord, plus octave range, gate, swing, latch, and ratchet rolls.
- Its own order called Drift: instead of a fixed pattern, the next note is a weighted random walk through the chord that you steer with an LFO, a macro, or the Mycelium field. Low settings stay near the low notes in small steps, high settings leap across the range. A live trail shows the notes scrolling past so you can watch the pattern move.
- Nothing else changes. Your patches and your license carry over, and the rest of Laura sounds exactly as it did.
Details
Two new things this round. A new effect for the rack, and an arpeggiator on the sequencer.
Murmuration is one of the effects I started Laura to build. It's a delay, but instead of fixed taps it runs a small flock of birds. Each bird is one echo. Where it sits left to right is its delay time, where it sits up and down is its pan, and how tightly it's packed with the others is how loud it is. The flock circles a roost point you set on the delay, and each bird is drawn toward the others while keeping a little space of its own, the way a real flock moves. The part worth having is what happens when you play: a note with an attack scares the flock and it scatters, then wheels back together and settles. So a pluck or a stab bursts open into a cloud of echoes that spread out and regroup, and since the flock is never in quite the same place, the cloud comes out different every time. On held chords it calms into a slow swarm instead. It ships with three presets, Starling Drift, Scatter Lead, and Void Flock.
The other new thing is an arpeggiator. It lives as a mode on the sequencer, so you pick it from the same Mode menu as the Geometric and physics modes and the panel switches over to it. Hold down a chord and it plays it back in time with the track. All the orders you'd expect are there, up, down, and the rest, with octave range, gate, swing, latch, and ratchet rolls. The one I kept coming back to is Drift: rather than a fixed up or down, the next note is a weighted random walk through the chord that you steer with an LFO, a macro, or the Mycelium field. At a low setting it stays down among the bottom notes and moves in small steps; push it higher and it starts leaping across the whole range. A live trail across the panel shows the notes scrolling past so you can see the shape, which makes it the most fun I've had watching an arp.
None of this touches your saved patches, and your license carries over the same as always.