Physical Audio Tetrad (VST3/AU/AAX Synthesizer)

[c0nsilience]

I am demoing this synth. It is polyphonic, which is cool, and has an interesting signal flow. However, the GUI does not appear to be resizable. Am I missing something? I am turning 60 in a couple of months and use computer glasses, but this thing is just at the edge of my ability to resolve the text for smaller controls on my high res laptop screen. Modus and Preparation 2 are similar, but Tetrad’s color scheme is more difficult for me to resolve. Even just a couple of fixed scale factors upward like maybe 1.3 and 1.6 would be helpful.

No, it's not currently resizable.

[cjwseven7]

In short, really really cool!

Four oscillators into a 4x4 matrix (4 inputs from each oscillator into 4 output busses) and that matrix is then passed through a filter (Lp, HP and Bp) then into an amp modulator and from there into another filter. After the second filter there's a granular processor and then another filter into 4 metal plates.

Each processor has a macro page and then a quad page. The Macro page controls the main parameters of the processor and then the quad page allows you individual control of each buss within that processor.

In the quad page with the AM you can offset each bus, with the granular you can adjust grain size and pitch of each buss, with the plates you can control decay and drive.

The oscillators have 5 modes, semitone mode where each oscillator can be tuned in semitones, Free mode where you can micro tune each oscillator, flex mode where tuning is spread out from a point up to an octave or fine tuned for a more unison like effect , chord mode which is a fixed chord that doesn't follow a scale and modal mode another chord mode where it does quantise to a selected mode and key. Both chord modes have voicing and inversion settings.

The oscillator waveforms are global and you can sweep through from sine to a sort of saw. They also have FM. There's a global AMP adsr too.

There's a huge modulation matrix with eight LFOs, the ADSR, the AM wave, grain generation, Midi and MPE as sources and pretty much anything as destination.

In practice it all works very logically. As the blurb say you do kind of think in fours. Four oscillators into four busses.

The AM processor allows you to do Arp like things by offsetting each buss' phase. The offsets themselves can also be altered by Lfos so you can get really cool rhythmic patterns. Then feed that into the granulator for more shenanigans.

You can use the drive mode in the Plates without the reverb which adds even more dimension. That can be done on a buss by buss basis too.

One other cool thing is that it can be used as an audio effect by sidechaining audio into it. In this mode the left and right of the audio become the inputs for the busses. So it becomes as a quad granulator/reverb/drive multi effect.

It has a nice soundtage where you can position the four elements but also each bus can be routed to an individual channel in your daw for further fun.

It took me a minute to figure out but it's pretty easy and very flexible.

I have a few other Physical Audio VIs and this is the easiest to use and arguably the most useful

This is an accurate description of the plugin's functionalities. Clicking the info button in the plugin will open a link to a quickstart guide that contains roughly the same information. We are aiming to submit short video tutorials in the next few days.

[kraster]

In short, really really cool!


I have a few other Physical Audio VIs and this is the easiest to use and arguably the most useful

Ok, i see. Thanks alots for your detailed description !
It was not that part i was looking for, but as morphex said, you´ve made something very complex look comprehenshable

It's definitely capable of being very weird sounding.

I do think though that once you've figured out the overall structure and workflow it kind of clicks and it's easy to know where to go with it.

For arps, for example, you can set the mode to modal and give each oscillator it's own buss output. So diagonally down from the top left to bottom right.

Set the AM to beat sync and either adjust the master phase offset in the macro window or adjust each buss' phase in the quad window.

[martiu]

weird is good

[masterhiggins]

very nice, Richard Devine will love this, you should send him a copy to test it on his youtube channel

He loves every synth. He’s the Jordan Rudess of plugins.

[simmo75]

Hi Physical Audio, is there a reason you don’t make your plugins resizable?

[martinjuenke]

Hi Physical Audio, is it possible to transfer your licenses to another guy?

[cjwseven7]

Hi Physical Audio, is it possible to transfer your licenses to another guy?

Hi, can you email support? We’ll look into this.

[Funky40]

It's definitely capable of being very weird sounding.

I do think though that once you've figured out the overall structure and workflow it kind of clicks and it's easy to know where to go with it.

thanks again @kraster !

[wakax]

lovely and weird!
really enjoying it.
thanks Physical Audio!

[218]

@physical Audio very interesting new product, when does the sale end?

[cjwseven7]

@physical Audio very interesting new product, when does the sale end?

Hi, thanks! The intro sale will end on July 28th.

[Funky40]

Hi, thanks! The intro sale will end on July 28th.

Ok, thanks !

hope i find some colder days here until then. Not made any music for days.......

[cake builder]

Played around with the plugin for a while. It's very cool, but this is another situation that is making me think it's about time to build a new PC. The CPU usage is pretty high on my old machine.

[Gribs]

I decided to not buy this for now. Resizable GUIs are an essential product feature and are now a “P0” requirement for me.