The initial idea I had for the KVR DC was to do kind-of an emulation of the Morphor Echon 6, that I really loved when I tried it at SynthFest France 2026 in April, but it sounded a bit complicated to do in only a few weeks of time, and I was quite busy those last months, so I had even given up on the idea of participating this time around, even though I would have liked to give it a shot in 2023.
Then in May, I worked on a Shimmer reverb for a client, and I discovered that it is quite enjoyable to play with the self-oscillated texture when decay is very very high, and I found out by a chance a way to let it stay even if there is no input for a while. A few hours after, I was implementing tons of DSP to manipulate the texture over time, like in an instrument, and that's when I decided to do something for the KVR DC, inspired from a lot of stuff I enjoy at the moment and that I don't own, like the Echon 6, Erica Synths FX boxes, the Nautilus module from Qu-Bit, the BBD delay in the Behringer Neutron, the Korg NTS stuff with their great Submarine and Space/Riser reverbs which inspire the design and the name of the plug-in... My 7-year-old daughter also contributed to the UI design with a drawing.
So it is a reverb FX, a Shimmer with negative or positive pitches, involving a BBD delay emulation in the Shimmer signal path for extra crunch / nonlinearities, and an instrument when it is in self-oscillation, needing you to record the output or full automation while playing / recording something, like a drone machine / texture generator, with macros controls to add modulation, resonators and stuff on the sound generated in the reverb loops.
It was very fun to make, and I spent quite the time on the DSP but also on the UI / UX design, because I wanted it to be a large step up from what I did with Spaceship Delay ten years ago (thanks Affinity Photo / Designer and Knobman3d + JUCE for coding some of the UI stuff directly), even if I'm still working on a reskin that will be available soon.
And there are an embedded tutorial, and easter eggs + hidden features
https://soundcloud.com/musicalentropy/s ... dfae82f120
Good luck to all the other contestants, thanks to KVR for hosting this, and have fun with Voyage Voyage! I’ll be open to feature requests, but I’ll only be able to work on them after the contest ends (obviously, this doesn’t include bug fixes).
