Highlights
- Zap Gate is the eighteenth device in the rack. A sixteen step gate rides your host's grid, and each opening fires a filter sweep that falls from a pitch you set per step. Depth, Length, Slew, Swing, Tone, Res, Decay and Vowel shape it; a Vowel knob slides a second formant in so the pattern talks.
- The gate and the sweep are independent on purpose. Zap at zero is a clean trance gate. Depth at zero stops the gate closing and leaves the sweeps, which turns it into a step sequenced filter. Both up is the full psytrance zap machine.
- The pattern editor is three lanes over the same sixteen columns, one gesture each: click or drag the top lane for levels, drag the middle lane for each step's sweep pitch, click the bottom lane to turn a step into a roll of two, three or four hits.
- A freshly added Zap Gate changes nothing until you carve it. Every step starts open, so dropping it into a playing rack is silent about it, the same courtesy Timefold extends.
- Turning Res up does not get louder. The resonant peak is level matched across the knob's whole range, so you can ride it with a macro without watching the meter.
- Laura FX gets the same device plus four ready made chains: Zap Machine, Trance Gate, Talking Stabs and Rolling Ratchets.
- The download is about a third smaller. The archive used to carry every binary twice, once loose and once inside the installer; now it ships the installers alone, and the in app updater downloads far less for the same result.
- The manual has a Zap Gate chapter, and its contents page finally points at the pages the chapters are actually on.
Details
This one started as the least exotic idea on my list. Laura's rack leans hard into effects you cannot get elsewhere, and a trance gate is about as conventional as it gets. What earned it the slot is what happens when the gate opens: each opening fires a resonant sweep that starts at a pitch you choose per step and falls to a floor you choose once, so a pattern is not just a rhythm, it is a melody of little laser hits. Vary the pitch lane across the bar and the gate starts to talk.
The two halves are deliberately separate controls. Zap at zero gives you a plain gate with a Slew knob that goes from a hard chop to a pumping swell, which covers the classic trance and techno uses. Depth at zero pins the gate open and leaves only the sweeps, which is a step sequenced filter, a thing I did not plan and now use more than the gate. Both up at once is the sound the name promises.
One measurement from the bench worth sharing: the first version of the resonance knob got three times louder at the top of its range, which is ten decibels of surprise on a knob labelled Res. A resonant filter peaks at roughly its resonance, so the compensation now divides that back out. What you hear as you turn it up is the ring getting sharper, not the track getting louder.
The smaller download is the other half of this release. The archive had been carrying every binary twice, once as loose bundles and once inside the installer that installs the same files. The installers already contain everything, so now they travel alone. Nothing about what lands on your machine changes; there is simply a third less to fetch, and the in app updater, which downloads the archive to run the installer out of it, gets the same saving on every update from here on.
If you own Laura this is a free update, as every update is. Your patches, packs and license are untouched.