Melatonin has announced the release of an additive synthesizer powered by up to 10,000 time-domain oscillators. After more than six years of research and development, Sine Machine is out of early access and available for macOS, Windows and Linux (VST3, AU and CLAP), with a free 14-day demo.
Sine Machine is designed to be a friendly starting point for additive synthesis, with colorful real-time visualizers that show what’s happening as you go. It offers deep control for advanced sound designers, individual partial ratios, per-harmonic ADSRs, and per-harmonic pitch, glide, and tremolo for sound designers who want to go further.
“Additive synthesis has a reputation for being technical and hard to use,” said Sudara Williams, founder of Melatonin. “With Sine Machine, I went back to first principles. I wanted to make something tactile and inspiring. Something that feels more like an instrument and less like a lab tool.”
Sine Machine excels at evolving pads, shimmering textures and detailed leads and effects. Its per-harmonic controls let musicians create timbres that aren’t possible with subtractive or wavetable synths, from lush, shifting drones to glitchy, animated patterns. Additive synths are rare gems in the plugin world and Sine Machine takes an unusually direct approach. Rather than building around resynthesis, FFT analysis or wavetables, its engine plays up to 10,000 time-domain oscillators playable in real-time, shaped by 20,000 LFOs.
Each control in Sine Machine manipulates the magnitude or frequency of the sine waves. There’s no additional dsp outside of a final limiter. The result is an additive engine with features that feel native to the medium, like harmonic arpeggiation, per-harmonic glide and noise, and an Additive Reverb built only from sine waves.
Sine Machine features
- Harmonic arpeggiation, for animated, cascading patterns.
- Per-harmonic control over envelopes, volumes and pitch (including creative glide modes).
- Additive Reverb, built from 1,000 additional sine waves.
- Additive “filters” including brick wall and gaussian bandpass shapes.
- Per-harmonic gaussian pitch noise for organic and lofi textures.
- 130+ factory presets.
- Hackable plaintext JSON presets for deep engine experimentation.
- 20 voices of polyphony, each with 511 time-domain oscillators.
- MTS-ESP microtonal support.
- Keyboard and screen reader accessibility.
Sine Machine is available today, starting at $60 USD. Rekkerd readers can get a 10% discount by using coupon code REKKERD at the checkout. Melatonin keeps pricing straightforward and doesn’t do sales, Black Friday, or distribute via third-party sites.
More information: Melatonin
