Xodoi
Granular Drone Cloud
Part of Studies
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The original plugin with its own interface, as a one-time purchase.
Description
Xodoi is a drone and texture generator. It uses classical granular synthesis to turn a simple synth into dense, glassy washes of cascading sound, and with the grains turned off it's a plain drone synth you can play like any other.
We built it around a primitive engine that multiplies a carrier by a modulator, which is closer to ring modulation than to FM, with a third oscillator added a little above the note. SHAPE morphs the carrier and modulator waveforms at the same time. Xodoi records the result into a loop about a second and a half long and break it into tiny grains, so anything you change in the synth also changes the grain cloud.
Play it from a MIDI track. Each note plays the carrier, the modulator and the harmonic oscillator through a Moog-style filter. Xodoi keeps recording the last second and a half of that into a loop, and two grain players read from it, one for each side. CLOUD fades between the synth and the grains.
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Contour
- CONTOUR
- Sets the attack and release of each note together, from 0.01 to 5 seconds. It applies from the next note you play.
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Carrier
- SHAPE
- Morphs the carrier and modulator waveforms at once, in opposite directions. At either end they're sawtooths facing opposite ways, and in the middle both are triangles.
- ORBIT
- Sets the depth of a very slow LFO that pulls the carrier's waveform away from the SHAPE setting, and the harmonic oscillator's by half as much. It rises and falls about every 50 seconds.
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X modulator
- VARIANT
- Sets the modulator's frequency, from 50 to 500 Hz. It doesn't follow the notes you play, so sweeping it shifts the tone and makes it inharmonic. It does nothing when SYNC is FIXED.
- SYNC
- In FREE, the modulator follows VARIANT. In FIXED, it locks to 1.5 times the note you play, so every key gets the same tuned, harmonic tone.
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Harmonic
- HARMONICS
- Sets the pitch of the third oscillator, from a tenth of a semitone above the note up to an octave above it. It's added to the multiplied tone, not multiplied with it.
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Moog filter
- COLOR
- Sets the cutoff of the Moog-style low-pass filter, from 80 Hz to 16 kHz.
- EVOLVE
- Sets the speed of an LFO that pulls the cutoff down by up to half, from a very slow drift to a few dips a second.
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Grain cloud
- CLOUD
- Fades from the plain synth to the grain cloud. All the way down, Xodoi is a simple drone synth. All the way up you hear only the grains, and changing the synth controls gives you different cloud textures.
- DENSITY
- Sets the length of the grains, from 10 to 100 ms. Turning it up also raises the grains' pitch and scatters it more widely.
- SPREAD
- Sets the stereo width of the cloud, from the same grains on both sides to a separate cloud on each side.
-
Master
- OUTPUT
- Sets the output level, from silent up to double. The center is unity.
Try thisHold a chord and automate DENSITY and COLOR slowly. Xodoi has some slow modulation built in, but it sounds best with slow automation on top. The glassy grains also sound great through a delay and a reverb, so chain both after it.
In Studies
Xodoi is in Studies Instruments, under Granular and Synthesizer. Load it on a MIDI track.
Playing it
Xodoi is polyphonic and responds to pitch bend, but velocity doesn't change the level. CONTOUR is read when a note starts. The grains come from the last second and a half of the synth, so the cloud trails on for a moment after you let go.
Bundle
The standalone plugin is also part of the Ambient Suite.
- Formats
- Studies: Audio Units, VST2 and VST3 on Mac, VST3 on Windows · Apple silicon native
- Systems
- Current macOS and Windows 10/11 x64
Standalone version
The original plugin with its own interface, as a one-time purchase.
AU · VST2 · VST3 · macOS · Windows