Time Focus - Gross Beat/Time Warping Sampler - Curve ENV Editor - Win/mac alpha demo

[Touch The Universe]

FOCUS·TIME — a curve-drawn time/pitch/texture mangler (GrossBeat-style workflow, way more engines)

If you've used GrossBeat, the workflow will click instantly: draw a curve on a tempo-synced timeline, the audio follows it in real time, loop it to the beat. FOCUS·TIME keeps that exact "draw a shape, audio obeys" gesture but routes it through twelve genuinely different DSP engines plus two master output lines, so the same drawing motion produces wildly different results depending on the tab.

The core idea

Every tab shares one curve editor: a horizontal timeline synced to host tempo (1/2/4/8-bar patterns, snap-to-grid), and a vertical axis whose meaning changes per engine. Click to add nodes, drag curves between them (linear or eased). A ghost overlay shows every other tab's curve faded behind the active one.

The twelve tabs

Warp — classic GrossBeat-style time-stretch/pitch curve: speed up, freeze, reverse-glitch sections live.

Stretch — this is literally Paulstretch, ported in full. 2x to 500x slowdown (default 50x), skewed so the useful 20-100x range sits in the middle of the knob. Turn any loop into an ambient drone/pad with the signature Paulstretch smear.

Formant — pitch-shift with independent formant correction — shift pitch without the chipmunk/Munchkin effect, or push it deliberately for robotic/demonic vocal effects.

Repeat — draw custom stutter/retrigger blocks directly on the timeline, each with its own length and position. Beat-repeat, but per-step custom.

Tape — varispeed emulation. Curve = playback speed (center=1x, top=4x, bottom=full stop) with an Inertia knob that simulates flywheel weight so speed changes glide like a real reel slowing down rather than snapping instantly.

Delay — curve-controlled delay time, 1ms–500ms, with feedback — draw delay-time automation synced to the pattern.

Scrape — additive friction/texture generator. Low curve values add tremolo modulation; high values sweep a tone from 80Hz to 4kHz — mechanical, metallic textures and risers.

Vowel — 5-formant vocal filter bank (Chamberlin SVFs) morphing through u-o-a-e-i across the curve, with a unison/stack knob for choir thickness.

Freq Shift — true Hilbert-transform frequency shifter (not pitch-shift) — ±5000Hz of inharmonic, bell-like detuning, classic Doppler/ring-mod-adjacent textures.

Spring — this is a black-hole-style reverb: an input diffuser feeding 4 modulated, size-morphing dispersive feedback lines. The curve controls tank size (0.2x–4x), so you can sweep from a tight spring-reverb ping into an infinite, smeared cathedral/black-hole tail and back.

LFO — curve draws the LFO rate (7Hz–22Hz), modulating either a Chamberlin lowpass cutoff or pitch vibrato (±3 semitones), with sine/tri/saw/square shapes.

Harmonic — additive resonator: curve controls how many of 16 partials are active (1 at top, 8 center, 16 at bottom). Transient mode strikes the resonator bank on every hit in your audio like a mallet on a bell; Free mode is a continuous additive drone. Spread knob (or its own bipolar curve via right-click) warps the partial series from compressed clusters through harmonic to stretched/inharmonic. Full stereo width via micro-detuned L/R phase.

Master output lines (new in B27) — two additional always-on curves sitting after all twelve tab engines: a Master Filter line (top = transparent bypass, bottom sweeps to a dark lowpass) and a Master Volume line (gain/gating). These act as a final shaping pass over whatever combination of tabs is active.

Global Spread/Motion macro — a single bipolar knob (with optional LFO via Motion) that simultaneously bends every active tab's parameters AND shifts curve read-position by up to ±25%, giving one-knob "more extreme" or "more subtle" control across the whole stacked chain.
Workflow

Tempo-synced, loop-locked curves on every tab
Stackable: run multiple engines in series/parallel, or "Loop Sends" mode where tabs act as effect sends off one master loop

Full preset save/load (.ftp) with sample-path recall and missing-file warnings
Normalize button for clean gain-staging before transient-sensitive engines (Harmonic, Vowel)

The elevator pitch: GrossBeat's curve-driven automation workflow, but the effects chain underneath includes a full Paulstretch, a black-hole reverb, a Hilbert frequency shifter, a 5-formant vocal filter, and a transient-triggered additive resonator — twelve engines plus two master lines, all controlled by the same simple "draw a curve" gesture.

Routing modes

Three engines stack in Series (output of one tab feeds the next), Parallel (all active tabs process the same source independently and sum together), or Bed+Series — a hybrid where one tab acts as a static "bed" layer underneath a series chain on top of it.

The fourth mode, Loop Sends, is built specifically for drum loops: instead of each tab being an independent processed copy of the loop (which doubles up the dry signal and stacks reverb tails awkwardly), Loop Sends treats the whole rig as one shared loop with a single read-head, and each active tab becomes an effect send off that loop. The master dry bed is subtracted from each tab's output afterward, so opening a send only adds its wet delta rather than another full copy of the loop — exactly the behavior you want when you're trying to glitch a drum loop without smearing the transients into mush.

Auto Haas de-phasing in Parallel mode

This is the detail most people miss until they A/B it: in Parallel mode, running 2-3 tabs on the same source simultaneously means their outputs are highly correlated — comb-filtering and phase cancellation show up fast, especially on anything with strong transients. FOCUS·TIME automatically applies a small per-tab Haas delay (sub-40ms, opposite-channel) the moment more than one tab is active in Parallel — each engine gets nudged to a slightly different stereo position (Warp left, Stretch center, Formant right, etc., with the exact spread depending on which combination is active). The result reads as width rather than phase mush. There's a Haas: ON/OFF toggle plus a Haas Amount knob (0-100%) if you want to dial the spread back for mono-sensitive material or push it further for a wider stack. Series, Bed+Series, and Loop Sends modes bypass Haas entirely since they don't have the same-source correlation problem.

Here is a Mac demo, windows coming soon of a grossbeat Time Based, Curve based Editor to play around with.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15Pt-v5 ... sp=sharing

Here is the windows version

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Lzifzt ... sp=sharing

[Touch The Universe]

Also, I have only tested this on my mac..

Type this in terminal, though not sure this is the best method.

sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/FOCUS TIME.vst3

[tumface]

AI generated?

[_al_]

Windows soon please

So we can only one tab active at a time? (warp, stretch etc)

[Touch The Universe]

Windows soon please

So we can only one tab active at a time? (warp, stretch etc)

All can be active and seen with ghost lines

Building now.

[Touch The Universe]

Here is the windows version alpha demo.

[Touch The Universe]

AI generated?

Yes, of course

I said give me a grossbeat sampler and whoala. It generated it.

[enCiphered]

AI generated?

The code is artificial, the prose is artificial but the superiority complex is impressively organic.

[wagtunes]

Well it all sound really cool but without a manual, I have no idea what I'm doing with this thing. Buy good luck with it.

[Touch The Universe]

I can make a video, and have the agents chern out a manual, but Honestly, load a wave from within it and start drawing lines

[wagtunes]

I can make a video, and have the agents chern out a manual, but Honestly, load a wave from within it and start drawing lines

Which is pretty much what I did. But as soon as you load a wav file it starts playing. There doesn't seem to be a MIDI trigger. At least I can't find one. Only way to stop it is to hit stop. Makes sound design a bit tedious having to hit start and stop with every line draw.

[Touch The Universe]

I can make a video, and have the agents chern out a manual, but Honestly, load a wave from within it and start drawing lines

Which is pretty much what I did. But as soon as you load a wav file it starts playing. There doesn't seem to be a MIDI trigger. At least I can't find one. Only way to stop it is to hit stop. Makes sound design a bit tedious having to hit start and stop with every line draw.

Indeed, Midi input is coming, but for now, start and stop from within the plugin only. That would be confusing, apologies, if you weren't aware. Next update will have space bar and hitting stop on daw also stop the playback. That has annoyed me now that I think about it.

In some ways it's kind of like standalone mode, though it's loaded in the daw.

I have like 10 more tabs and a lot more work to be done in here so it's kind of like an alpha to generate interest, hopefully. It is very much a work in progress, but cool enough as is to share imo.

Wish list are welcome and bug reports of course.

[Touch The Universe]

I just noticed there is a big in the harmonic generator when switching to other tabs, the secondary spread line gets ignored. I can hear it clearly in the video.