Soundhack creations endure years and decades, and now we get a new one. Think mighty morphing modeless modulation. Plexiphon is neither reverb or echo. It’s both, simultaneously, for spatial textural sounds you can shift fluidly. And in my quest to avoid being consumed by a sea of modules, this one just rose way up the list.
Listen/watch — they break this down nicely with sound examples in their launch video (probably better than Weird Sound From The Booth):
Okay, so let me explain why this is exciting — and no, I’m not using AI; the coffee just kicked. First, Tom is the John the Baptist of weird and wonderful and textural DSP algorithms. This is all-new code, unveiled for this module. And it’s after that messiah of continuously morphing space/echo, achieving that without tricks like crossfading or mode switching or swapping algorithms.
You’ve got your digital reverb. You’ve got your multi-tap echo. And yeah, algorithmic reverbs are big combinations of multi-tap echos, so we all intuitively want to be able to fluidly move between sounds where you hear distinct echoes and sounds that become continuous textures, more like a reverberant space. Only once you start messing around with parameters, it sounds like someone breached warp containment.
The clever idea here is the Plexus control, which modulates the number of feedback paths in the algorithm. Size determines the time value between feedback paths, which is what gives you the impact of what’s normally called “size.” “Couple” determines whether left and right outputs are independent or cross-fed, from dual mono to stereo. (The press release poetically uses the term “intermingled” for both these parameters, and that’s not a bad way to think about it with feedback paths involved!) Plexus, Size, and Color can all be adjusted with Skew to determine inverse or tandem control of left and right — a way to kind of angle sound through space.
And there’s a Send gate and an envelope follower. Basically, everything about this is intended to be performative and not that “drown everything in one long reverb preset forever without changing it” reverb.
Specs:
- Modeless Plexus operation allows instant voltage controlled access to all possible combinations of settings, no mode switching or algorithmic isolationism
- Stereo in, stereo out with mono sum normalizations for inputs and/or outputs
- Smooth modulation of space, time and intensity via Size and Decay
- Voltage control over stereo image with Couple
- Shape texture timbre with Diffusion and Color parameters
- Easy patching of dub echo techniques with Send gate
- CV Out completes the conversation between Plexiphon and the rest of your system!
- Pairs well with EVERYTHING
16HP and $469.
Maybe the premium price is a good thing, because then you make a small skiff and you really play this reverb rather than using it as some extra icing. I mean, Tom, I still want this as software, of course — I haven’t given up on the dream of the computer, especially since some software called “Soundhack” is part of what got me hooked in the first place. This looks so natively Eurorack and so Make Noise, that I’m curious how software might reimagine the interface. But that’s another story.
Nothing up on the site as I write this, but you know where to find them:
https://www.makenoisemusic.com/modules/
Their MultiWAVE got an update recently, too, in other Make Noise news.
And since the point of all of this is patchig, here are some ideas from them recently. On the leftfield side, some equal-divisions-of-the-octave microtuning (since I hear kids are into that at the moment):
And here are some ideas on where to get started: