Silent Way is a suite of plug-ins designed for use as part of a modular analogue synthesiser system. The plug-ins produce no sound themselves, nor do they process sound - rather, they generate signals to be used as control voltages (CVs), which can be patched into the control inputs of oscillators, filters, VCAs, etc. of an analogue system. Also, with the addition of the CV Input plug-in, it is possible to bring CVs from the synth into the computer, for recording or processing.

There are several plug-ins in the Silent Way suite - Silent Way DC, Silent Way LFO, Silent Way Trigger, Silent Way CV Input, Silent Way Voice Controller, Silent Way CV To OSC, Silent Way Step LFO, Silent Way Quantizer and Silent Way CV To MIDI. These are described in more detail below. It is anticipated that more plug-ins will be added to the suite in the future - watch the website for product announcements.

All plug-ins also feature:

• Full MIDI and OSC control.
• MIDI/OSC scriptability.
• Sample-accurate handling of MIDI note messages.

Silent Way Voice Controller
Silent Way Voice Controller is a virtual instrument plug-in designed to directly control an analogue synthesiser by generating the appropriate CV and gate signals via an appropriate audio interface. By listening to the synthesiser's output signal, the plug-in is able to calibrate itself to generate the appropriate pitch CV for the incoming MIDI notes. As well as the basic pitch and gate signals, the plug-in can generate three multi-stage envelope CVs which you can feed to VCAs, VCFs etc. in your synth.

Silent Way LFO
Silent Way LFO, as its name suggests, is intended as a low frequency oscillator, performing the same functions as LFOs in any other synth e.g. vibrato, filter cut-off modulation, auto-pan effects, etc.

Silent Way DC
Silent Way DC is a simple plug-in that generates constant output signals. It is intended to be used in conjunction with parameter automation (via MIDI or directly by the host application) to generate varying signals. For example, you could use it as an LFO where you draw out the LFO waveform in your host's parameter automation GUI.

Silent Way Trigger is a simple plug-in for generating a gate or envelope in response to an incoming MIDI note. A typical application would be for triggering drum sounds, where you might have a number of different sounds mapped to different notes.

Expert Sleepers says that Silent Way CV Input is something of a breakthrough in audio interface-based computer/CV interaction, since it lets you get your CVs back into the computer (most other CV-generation software focuses entirely on generating CVs). Moreover this plug-in has no special requirements on the audio interface, and so is not just usable by those with DC-coupled interfaces.

Silent Way CV To OSC translates CV signals (such as those produced by Silent Way CV Input, for example) into OSC messages. These can in turn be used to control all sorts of software and hardware devices.

Silent Way Step LFO is a combination step sequencer and LFO generator. It shares many of the features of the LFO plug-in, but rather than generating waveforms based on simple sine, triangle, etc. waves it generates a waveform that the user draws in the GUI. When the waveform is interpreted as a series of discrete values, rather than as a continuous wave-form, then the output is that of a traditional analogue step sequencer.

Silent Way Quantizer is a CV processing plug-in that constrains the incoming (continuous) CVs to a number of discrete values. For example, it can constrain a pitch CV to exact semitone values. This is especially useful when combined with the Step LFO plug-in in order to accurately sequence musical notes, but it can also be used with e.g. the regular LFO plug-in, or with the Voice Controller plug-in to turn portamentos into discrete glissandos.

The Quantizer plug-in is capable of loading the calibration data from the Voice Controller plug-in, in order to output accurately calibrated pitches.

Silent Way CV To MIDI translates CV signals (such as those produced by Silent Way CV Input, for example) into MIDI messages. These can in turn be used to control all sorts of software and hardware devices. Used in conjunction with, say, Silent Way LFO, the CV To MIDI plug-in provides a standalone means of generating MIDI LFOs, giving Silent Way an application to musicians who have no analogue gear at all.