Downspout VST3 plugins

Downspout

VST3 tools for generated parts, gated movement, and playable disruption.

These plugins are all experimental, mostly work in progress, with various levels of success for their intended purposes.

See also :

Melody, Harmony & Bass Generators 12

Write the notes for you: melodies, chords, counter-lines, basslines and long-form structure.

BassGen plugin interface MIDI generator BassGen Transport-synced bassline generator with style, scale, Moroder/Fugue/Jazz/Descending genres, variation, color, and MIDI follow/dodge controls. MelGen plugin interface MIDI generator MelGen Phrase-aware melody generator with contour, answer, structure, color, range, follow, and strict subject/answer behavior. Cadence plugin interface MIDI effect Cadence Transport-aware MIDI harmonizer and comping generator with learned harmony, color, extended voicings, suspended dominants, and arpeggiated phrasing. Counterpointer plugin interface MIDI generator/effect Counterpointer Learns an incoming MIDI pattern and emits a monophonic answering line with color control. Sidecar plugin interface MIDI generator Sidecar MIDI phrase player for generated solo material with deterministic local generation and optional localhost coordinator requests. Harmonic Atlas plugin interface MIDI generator Harmonic Atlas Seeded autonomous chord and scale guidance with tonal, modal, chromatic-mediant, and neo-Riemannian-inspired movement. Conductor plugin interface MIDI generator Conductor Bar-aligned intro, development, break, reprise, and coda commands for autonomous patches. ToneWorm plugin interface MIDI generator ToneWorm Paterson's Worm navigates a Tonnetz pitch lattice, generating transport-locked melodies from six directional rules with scale quantization and Conductor CC control. Ground plugin interface MIDI generator Ground Long-form bass generator with Grounded, Dub, Jazz, and other phrase styles plus a guarded bass register lane. Tuney VST plugin interface Instrument / MIDI generator Tuney VST Focused typing and stored text become microtonal synthesized audio and MIDI through configurable character maps, scales, tunings, and human timing. Sprout plugin interface MIDI generator Sprout A grammar is rewritten generation by generation and played as a scale-quantised line, optionally growing one generation every few bars. Markov plugin interface MIDI generator Markov A melody as a random walk through a visible transition matrix you can draw, pick a style for, or learn from a line you play.

Rhythm & Pattern Generators 8

Drum patterns, polymeters, ghost notes, arpeggios and Launchpad grid sequencers.

DrumGen plugin interface MIDI drum generator DrumGen Transport-aware MIDI drum generator with fills, style modes, Breakbeat/Jazz/Fugue genres, and sparse pulse options. Xoxolo plugin interface MIDI generator Xoxolo Simple x0x-style MIDI drum pattern editor with note-map presets, per-lane preview, and selectable 8-32 step patterns, and an optional cellular-automaton Evolve layer per lane. Arpgen plugin interface MIDI effect Arpgen Meter-aware chord-capture and scale-derived arpeggiator with four traversal orders and triplet grids. Polymeter plugin interface MIDI generator Polymeter Four Euclidean lanes with independent coprime lengths, rotations, ratchets, probability, accents, notes, and channels. Luma plugin interface MIDI generator · Launchpad Luma Launchpad-oriented performance generator where lit pads become bass, chord, melody, and drum agents. Lifeform plugin interface MIDI generator · Launchpad Lifeform Conway Game of Life MIDI generator where the Launchpad grid evolves one beat at a time. Ghost plugin interface Audio/MIDI effect Ghost Audio-triggered ghost notes in time with the transport — ghost drum beats on channel 10 or ghost notes on a selectable channel, with Drift CC control over feel. Spindown plugin interface Audio effect Spindown A tape-stop effect. The tape slows to a standstill, pitch and time falling together, then spins back up. Trigger it by hand, from held MIDI notes, or on a bar cycle locked to the host.

Drum & Percussion Voices 5

MIDI-triggered kicks, snares, hats, cymbals and hand percussion.

Thumper plugin interface MIDI drum generator Thumper Kick drum generator with virtual analog, modal, FM, wavetable, 808/909 and physical engines plus style presets. Snatch plugin interface MIDI drum generator Snatch Snare generator with tone+noise, metal, brush, electronic and acoustic engines and presets. Tops plugin interface MIDI drum generator Tops Hi-hats, crash, ride, splash, china, cowbell, tambourine and triangle with several synthesis engines. Clatter plugin interface MIDI drum generator Clatter 31 General MIDI percussion sounds (toms, congas, shakers, claves, guiros...) in five synthesis families with choke groups. DrumKit plugin interface Instrument DrumKit Drum synth instrument with stereo output, MIDI triggering, per-voice controls, and mute strips.

MIDI Processing & Control 9

Gate, retune, remember, capture and modulate MIDI; drive other plugins with CC.

M-Mix plugin interface MIDI effect M-Mix MIDI gate combining probabilistic bar transitions with Euclidean block patterns. Mixgen plugin interface MIDI control generator Mixgen Eight repeatable mix lanes plus four configurable effect macros for the loosely coupled Producer Control Bus. Drift plugin interface MIDI modulator Drift Four rate-limited seeded CC lanes with LFO, sample-and-hold, walk, chaos, and audio follower modes. Mnemosyne plugin interface MIDI effect Mnemosyne Fixed-capacity phrase capture, recall, transformation, and autonomous recombination. Oracle plugin interface Audio/MIDI effect Oracle Bounded level, onset, brightness, density, pitch-class, and MIDI analysis mapped to guarded CC and note responses. Gremlin Driver plugin interface MIDI effect Gremlin Driver MIDI modulation and action sequencer with expanded lane shapes intended to drive Gremlin. Flues Synth Driver plugin interface MIDI controller Flues Synth Driver Turns its panel controls into MIDI CCs and program changes that play the external Flues vocal and physical-model synthesizer. Midiscribe plugin interface Utility Midiscribe Non-destructive MIDI capture plugin that writes recorded events to a Standard MIDI File (.mid) on demand. Retune plugin interface MIDI effect Retune Retunes any MIDI note stream to a Scala .scl scale using one pitch bend and one channel per note, so ordinary generators can drive microtonal synths.

Synthesizers 13

Tonal and physically modelled instruments: FM, wavetable, waveguide, modal, drone and bass.

Floozy plugin interface Instrument Floozy Selectable 1-8 voice (default 4) synthesizer combining distortion sources, physical-model-style excitation, feedback, filtering, modulation, and reverb. Basilico plugin interface Instrument Basilico Monophonic bass instrument with tempo-synced wobble, acid squelch, and upright/electric/dub/acid/industrial tones. Canticle plugin interface Instrument Canticle 12-voice keys, reed, pad, pluck, and glass instrument for melody, counterpoint, and chord generators. Moka plugin interface Instrument Moka Stereo modal synth for struck objects — xylophone, glockenspiel, woodblock, glass bowl, metal sheet, and tube — with ten controls and eleven factory presets. Plank plugin interface Instrument · Launchpad Plank Eight-voice polyphonic synthesizer for the Launchpad grid, with a Plinky-derived wavetable voice and Plonk-style resonator engines. Pratt plugin interface Instrument Pratt Eleven General MIDI voices and a stable all-pole filter, all shaped by the factorisation of an integer index — play it, filter audio with it, or both. Trajectory plugin interface Instrument Trajectory Eight-voice synthesizer whose oscillator is a point bouncing inside a regular polygon, with a full ADSR — six oscillator controls on CC 1-6, so Drift's lanes drive it with no setup. Fathom plugin interface Instrument Fathom Four-voice drone synthesizer with five generator algorithms, a notch filter and a delay network with a frequency shifter in its loop — CC 1-4 line up with Drift's lanes. Bore plugin interface Instrument Bore An eight-voice lip-reed instrument: nonlinear reed flow excites a pitch-tuned bore with controllable turbulence and upper-mode capture. Strata plugin interface Instrument Strata An eight-voice wavetable synthesizer with band-limited tables, Bend, Sync and Fold warps, a sine sub, unison, a multimode filter, two envelopes and an LFO. Quartet plugin interface Instrument Quartet An eight-voice four-operator FM synthesizer with eleven algorithms, band-limited sine, saw and square operators, per-operator envelopes, feedback, optional 2x oversampling, a pitch envelope and a filter. Monochord plugin interface Instrument Monochord An eight-voice waveguide string that can be plucked, bowed or struck, with a loop tuned from its own phase delay, damping, stiffness, a pickup comb and a small body. Wheelhouse plugin interface Instrument Wheelhouse A tonewheel organ with 91 tone wheels, nine drawbars for each of two manuals and two for the pedals, percussion, scanner vibrato and chorus, key click and overdrive.

Samplers & Unusual Sound Sources 7

Samplers, speech, birdsong, water, engines and glitch machines.

Campione plugin interface Instrument Campione Multi-zone sampler with per-note MIDI mapping, WAV loading, REX2 slice import, Serum wavetable auto-detection, audio recording with auto-pitch detection, pitch-shift gap fill, zero-crossing loop snap, crossfade looping, per-zone ADSR/filter/pan, beat slicing, and an embedded MCP server. Bubbles plugin interface Instrument Bubbles Stereo ambient water synthesizer combining subtractive noise, physical bubble and drip modelling, body resonances, wave oscillator, and an LFO modulator — with seven water-environment presets. Syrinx plugin interface Instrument Syrinx Avian syrinx voice based on the Mindlin-Laje biophysical model with 11 bird-species presets. MIDI notes play phrases of chirping syllables; an audio input is analysed for pitch and loudness and steers the bird, so it works on speech and singing. Gremlin plugin interface Instrument Gremlin Glitch instrument with six sound modes, scenes, fader-block macros, action triggers, hold pads, and MIDImix LED feedback. Mosaic plugin interface Sampler instrument Mosaic Four-slot bounded WAV sampler with seeded slices, pitch variation, reverse, stereo spread, and autonomous triggering. Magneto plugin interface Instrument Magneto Physically informed four-stroke engine — waveguide cylinders, intake runners, extractors, muffler and tailpipe — driven by RPM and throttle, with a selectable listening position. Sam plugin interface Instrument Sam The 1982 Software Automatic Mouth speech synthesiser. Type text, then play it from MIDI, one word per note sung at the key's pitch, or let the host transport read it aloud, one word per step.

Filters, Distortion & Tone Shaping 10

Filters, vowels, EQ, saturation, lo-fi, amp modelling and resonators.

Damiano plugin interface Audio effect Damiano Six-mode stereo distortion with drive, tone shelf, wet/dry mix and output gain. Linked or Split left/right processing for a binaural effect, with Drift CC control of each channel's drive and shape. Skream plugin interface Audio effect Skream SVF lowpass/highpass with ADAA2 feedback saturation. Recreates the Skrillex-era dubstep growl. Ten presets from classic growl to feedback drone; Cutoff and Scream modulatable via MIDI CC from Drift. Chipper plugin interface Audio effect Chipper 1980s video game lo-fi processor. Bitwise quantization (bit depth 1–16), sample-rate reduction via sample-and-hold (divisor 1–64), and randomised clock jitter for vintage digital harshness. Resonance Garden plugin interface Audio effect Resonance Garden Up to twelve bounded damped resonators tuned by held MIDI or an internal scale chosen from 23 scales. HelterSkelter plugin interface Audio effect HelterSkelter Automatic wah — a resonant lowpass played by the input envelope and/or a BBT-synced ADSR cycle, with Drift CC control. Ladder plugin interface Audio effect Ladder A four-pole saturating low-pass ladder with self-oscillating resonance, a bass-compensation control, drive, mix and output, and a live plot of its response. Octet plugin interface Audio effect Octet An eight-band parametric equalizer with bell, shelf, notch and 12 or 48 dB cut bands, Stereo, Left/Right and Mid/Side modes with per-band channel assignment, and a plot with a draggable node per band. NAM plugin interface Audio effect NAM A Neural Amp Modeler player. Load a .nam amp capture and a .wav cabinet impulse response, shape them with gain, gate, tone and cabinet cuts, and mix them back with the dry signal. Mouth plugin interface Audio effect Mouth Puts a vowel on any sound. Five formant filters morph between A, E, I, O and U on an x-y pad, for bass, tenor, alto and soprano voices, with shift, resonance, stereo spread, drive and air. Zmorph plugin interface Audio effect Zmorph One resonant filter that morphs continuously between a low-pass and a high-pass at the same cutoff, so half-way is a deep notch. Cutoff, resonance, morph, mix and output level.

Delay, Reverb & Space 11

Reverbs, delays, loopers, ambience and stereo movement.

Loopdelay plugin interface Audio effect Loopdelay Producer-ready stereo delay and looper with BBT time, CC 19 ownership, channel isolation, and MIDI-through. Lightverb plugin interface Audio effect Lightverb Fixed-cost stereo reverb with Producer Control Bus lifecycle, channel isolation, and MIDI-through. Orbit plugin interface Audio effect Orbit Smooth seeded orbit, pendulum, random-walk, and figure-eight stereo trajectories with distance filtering and conservative Doppler. Ambo plugin interface Audio effect Ambo Stereo ambient effect with rearrangeable time, spectral, tape, shimmer, delay, drive, and feedback stages. PaunchLad plugin interface Audio effect/instrument · Launchpad PaunchLad Launchpad dub performance effect with echo throws, sirens, spring splashes, dropouts, and chops. Treatment plugin interface Audio effect Treatment Physically modelled acoustic treatment panels — up to four mass-air-mass absorbers in series, with a Ring mode and a tempo-syncable resonance sweep for special effects. Spense plugin interface Audio effect Spense A stereo phase disperser: up to eight cascades of eight all-pass filters that delay frequencies near a chosen centre without changing level, with a live group-delay plot. HeavyVerb plugin interface Audio effect HeavyVerb A high-quality reverb for the master bus, built from one to six wall-pair dimensions with their own distance, damping and filter, plus shimmer, swell, duck, gate and freeze and fifteen presets. Prism plugin interface Audio effect Prism Splits the sound into 1-8 frequency bands and delays each one separately on the left and right, in milliseconds or note divisions of the host tempo, with its own feedback. Per-band solo, low and high cut, four FFT sizes. Whirligig plugin interface Audio effect Whirligig A rotary speaker with a drum and a horn rotor, two microphones, inertia between Slow and Fast, and an optional mode that locks the rotation to the host's tempo and bar position. Chorale plugin interface Audio effect Chorale A stereo chorus with the three Juno-style voicings and a Custom mode of one to four voices, plus Tone, Width and Mix, with CC control of Rate, Depth, Width and Mix.

Granular, Spectral & Pitch 13

Grains, freezes, time stretch, vocoders, formant and pitch manipulation, buffer disruption.

Rift plugin interface Audio effect Rift Transport-locked stereo buffer effect with live/sample modes, WAV loading, chop/stutter repeats, reverse, skip, smear, and pitch-slip actions. Orchid plugin interface Audio effect Orchid Transport-aware voiced freeze effect that captures stable pitched material and holds period-aligned loops on the host grid. Primefold plugin interface Audio effect Primefold Direct 2x/3x/5x pitch voices with non-prime harmonics supplied by recirculation — 4x from 2x fed back, 6x from 2x and 3x combined — through a bounded loop with an explicit delay that is never compensated. Quefrency plugin interface Audio effect Quefrency Splits each frame through the cepstrum into a formant envelope and a harmonic structure, shifts and reshapes each independently, and multiplies them back together — with the latency the web version never reported now declared to the host. Keyframe plugin interface Audio effect Keyframe Time stretch after the DAFx26 extrema-sampling method — the input reduces to timestamped local extrema, and the spacing between them sets the overlap-add crossfade length, so splices shorten into transients and lengthen through sustained material with no transient detector anywhere. Voxmod plugin interface Audio effect Voxmod Combined vocoder and ring modulator — a filter-bank vocoder and a band-limited ring modulator run in parallel and blend with Mix. Beards plugin interface Audio effect Beards Granular texture processor after Mutable Instruments Beads — a 4 second stereo buffer replayed by up to 32 grains, with feedback, freeze and reverb, controllable from Drift and Conductor. Qune plugin interface Audio effect Qune Tracks the pitch of a voice or single-note instrument and moves it to the nearest note of one of 24 scales, or to MIDI notes you hold. Three quality tiers, glide, formant preserve and shift. Sinevox plugin interface Audio effect Sinevox A formant tracker with two voices — a vocoder whose band-pass bank follows the speech's formants, and a sine-wave-speech generator — with MIDI control and formant-to-MIDI output. Grist plugin interface Audio effect Grist A grain delay. The input is cut into windowed grains, each with its own start, direction, length, position and pitch (optionally held to a scale), and the result can feed back through a filter. Fresco plugin interface Audio effect Fresco Paints a picture (PNG, PGM/PPM or BMP) into the audio's spectrogram: height is frequency, brightness is level, and a free-running or host-locked playhead sweeps the picture. Sieve plugin interface Audio effect Sieve An STFT mask that keeps only the partials near the notes of a chosen scale (or of the MIDI notes you hold), in every octave. The source keeps its own texture instead of being re-synthesised into new resonators. Scope plugin interface Utility Scope A spectrum analyser and level meter that passes audio through untouched. 64 log-spaced bands from 20 Hz to 20 kHz with a labelled grid, or per-channel peak and RMS meters plus a correlation readout.

Dynamics, Gating & Mixing 12

Compression, ducking, rhythmic gates and tremolo, mixing and output safety.

P-Mix plugin interface Audio effect P-Mix Stereo audio effect for transport-aware probabilistic switching and fades. E-Mix plugin interface Audio effect E-Mix Transport-aware Euclidean stereo gate with density, block, pattern, and fade controls. Bassops plugin interface Audio effect Bassops Four-input sidechain ducker with optional harmonic stereo synthesis, bass phase widening and a ring-mod mode. A control signal (typically a kick-drum send) ducks the main stereo signal; the ducked result is summed to mono and the harmonics added by a waveshaper, high-passed at the cutoff, are decoded as a side signal that generates stereo width above it. The bass stays clean mono. T-Mix plugin interface Audio mixer T-Mix Eight mono strips with manual controls, click-smoothed producer overlays, channel-isolated CC 19 ownership, and MIDI-through. Gater plugin interface Audio effect Gater MIDI-controlled audio switcher routing one input to one of two outputs based on note input. Guardian plugin interface Audio effect Guardian Input gain, look-ahead limiting with attack and release, variable-curve clipping (soft to hard), DC removal, true-peak protection, bypass, and latched fault recovery. Spliff plugin interface Audio effect Spliff Transient processing in the Spiff manner — dynamic cuts or boosts that apply only where transient energy lives, steered by a 3-band detector, with Drift CC control. Glue plugin interface Audio effect Glue A stereo-linked bus compressor with a soft knee, sidechain high-pass, peak or RMS detector, program-dependent auto release, soft clip and parallel mix, showing its transfer curve and gain reduction. Trio plugin interface Audio effect Trio Three-band dynamics with adjustable flat-summing crossovers, per-band downward compression and upward lift, Time and Amount macros, and live per-band gain bars. Infra plugin interface Audio effect Infra A stereo VCA driven by a beat-locked LFO: a whole multiple of the host beat rate within 1-20 Hz, eight waveforms, and a 0/90/180/270 degree phase for each channel. Interleaver plugin interface Audio effect Interleaver Weaves two stereo inputs into one, by slicing them in time (free or locked to the tracked pitch of either input) or by trading phase-vocoder bins. Silken plugin interface Audio effect Silken A vocal strip with a rumble filter, plosive guard, gate, harshness tamer, de-esser (band or wide, with listen), leveller, mud / warmth / presence / air EQ, drive, sparkle and output level.

All plugins, A–Z

One line each, for when you remember the name but not the group.