Scratches — Granular tape texture — VST3 / AU / Standalone
Scratches constantly records the last ten seconds of whatever you feed it onto an internal tape loop, then plays it back as a cloud of tiny grains — each with its own place in the past, pitch, direction and stereo position. The cloud runs through a worn tape stage and is fed back into the loop, so every repeat is re-granulated and re-degraded.
v1.0.0 · macOS 11+ · freewareWindows version coming in the near future.Three ways to think about it
Five panels
The heart of the plugin. A cloud of up to 200 grains per second dug from the last ten seconds of tape — position, spread, size, pitch and jitter snapped to musical scales, reverse probability, per-grain tone and glide. Freeze the tape and scrub through frozen time.
Saturation, wow & flutter with stereo swirl, a one-knob Age control, level-tracked hiss and digital fidelity decay. Drive and wobble sit inside the feedback loop, so every repeat comes back a little warmer, darker and more smeared — the way real tape degrades.
A hand-built plate on the wet signal — amount, decay to an endless wash, damping. Flip →LOOP and the tail is recorded back onto the tape, re-granulated and re-reverbed on every pass: a self-regenerating wash that keeps reshaping itself.
Feedback runs to 110% — past 100 the loop feeds itself and blooms into soft-limited self-oscillation. Duck steps the wet signal aside while you play and swells it back in the gaps; the equal-power mix goes all the way to pure texture.
Two assignable modulators — LFO shapes, one-shot ramps, a new-random-every-cycle mode and an envelope follower, with tempo sync and audio-triggered retriggering. Point one at any knob and the patch plays itself.
macOS 11 or later · VST3 · AU · Standalone
free download · Windows version coming soon
