ROB

Lacrimosa, played on 33 instances of ROB, every one on a factory preset you can load yourself. Seven groups on seven channels: press PLAY and follow the melody above the desk, then SOLO the choir or the brass to hear one sound on its own. Click a note to play from there.

On the Mac and on Windows, ROB opens as a hardware unit: two plates of knobs and keys between wooden cheeks, a 61-key keyboard with pitch and modulation wheels, the touch ribbon and two XY fields. Turn a knob, press a key, play the keys. EDIT opens the full editor.

Anthracite plates with a red title bar on every module, and one colour for everything that is on. VOLUME, DATA and CUTOFF have white caps, so your hand finds them first. The unit is drawn on the graphics card: with Metal on the Mac, with Direct3D 11 on Windows.

Each one plays a saw, triangle, pulse, sine, white or pink noise, or one of ROB’s wavetables. Turn SHAPE and it morphs smoothly from one waveform into the next, so you can play the waveform itself.

They run at eight times your host’s sample rate, so high notes stay clean. With the analog behaviour turned up, the saw bends like a charging capacitor, the way the old circuits did.

The low-pass is a transistor ladder, built the way the real circuit works. Every stage saturates. Turn the resonance up and it sings, and when it self-oscillates it stays in tune.

And you see what you hear: ROB’s own output runs as a live spectrum behind the curve, and every voice draws a faint cutoff line of its own.

Eight shapes, free or synced, per voice or one for all. On screen you see where every voice is on the waveform. Hold a chord with free-running LFOs and you watch the dots drift apart.

Every voice is a card with its own trimmers for tuning, cutoff, resonance, envelope speed and pulse width, all from the same batch of parts. Notes rotate across the cards, so a repeated note never sounds exactly the same twice.

The oscillators drift, the filters drift, and a slow ripple runs through the whole instrument like a power supply under load. And it all stays in tune, within a few cents.

Crush, an oversampled saturation, chorus, flangers and phasers, two tempo-synced delays with a bucket-brigade mode, an auto pan, and a reverb with room, hall, plate and spring. At the end, GLUE and an output stage that keeps every preset at the same loudness.

Type “warm slow pad with movement” or “dark punchy bass” and press MAKE. Name a style and ROB brings a pattern in that idiom. VARY gives four variations on whatever’s playing, every one in tune and just as loud.