Description
Cascading reflections from the last three seconds
Phanes keeps a few seconds of your input in a buffer and plays it back as a cloud of grains, which you can morph into a frozen, blurred spectral copy. The result climbs through a network of pitch-shifted reflections, picks up tape wear and settles into a diffuse reverb haze. From a faint atmospheric wash to a rising harmonic halo. We use it on vocal tails, piano and field recordings.
Phanes is a granular and spectral effect in Studies Effects. It's in the free tier, no card and no sign-in, and we don't sell it as a separate plugin.
Left to right, as on the faceplate
Input fills a three-second buffer; grains and their spectral copy meet at MORPH, then run through reflections, tape age, haze and width before the blend.
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Grain cloud
- DEPTH
- How far back in the buffer the grains reach, up to about three seconds. Low stays close to what you play; high scatters older material.
- CLOUD
- Density of the cloud. The grain rate wanders on its own, so it never settles into a steady pulse.
- CRYSTAL
- Transposes the grains up in semitones, to an octave.
- GRAIN
- Grain length, from 20 ms and glassy to half a second and smeared.
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Spectral · Morph
- BLUR
- Smooths the spectral copy over time into a smeared wash.
- FREEZE
- Holds the current spectrum. It acts on the spectral side only, so turn MORPH toward it to hear it.
- MORPH
- Crossfades from pure grains (left) to the frozen, blurred spectrum (right).
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Reflections
- REFLECT
- Feedback of four reflection taps spaced at golden-ratio intervals.
- SHIMMER
- Feeds a fourth, a fifth and an octave up into the later reflections, each building on the last. At zero they keep their pitch.
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Tape age · Haze · Width
- AGE
- Warble, dust, hiss, a darker top and a thinner low end on the reflections.
- HAZE
- Amount and length of a diffuse reverb tail.
- WIDTH
- Mono at left, natural stereo at center, wider at right.
-
Master
- BLEND
- Dry against processed.
- GAIN
- Output level up to double; center is unity.
-
Try this
- HALO
- Raise CRYSTAL and SHIMMER together for a bright, ascending halo.
- HOLD
- Turn MORPH right and press FREEZE to hold a chord in place while you keep playing over it.
Download Studies, load Studies Effects on an audio track, and pick Phanes under Granular or Spectral in the device browser.
Phanes is one of the ten free devices. A subscription opens the other fifty in the same install.
Sold separately?
We built Phanes for Studies, and it lives only there. Your project saves the device and its settings and reopens them the way you left them.
- Formats
- VST2, VST3, Audio Units · Apple silicon native
- Systems
- Current macOS and Windows 10/11 x64
- Hosts
- Any AU or VST/VST3 host