mfkne has released Tonebleed and Grainwash, two VST3 effect plugins for macOS and Windows.
Tonebleed
Tonebleed is a fuzz that multiplies the signal before it distorts, so the distortion stage saturates a chord instead of a single note. It has four controls:
- BLEED stacks drifting unison voices and granular octave copies in front of the fuzz.
- FUZZ drives them through a two-stage pedal circuit that closes its own tone stack as it opens, so the sound gets darker the harder the control is pushed.
- GRAIN cuts the result into grains whose length follows the host tempo, from an eighth note down to a sixty-fourth.
- AGE pulls the signal over a worn tape transport, with wow, flutter, saturation and head loss.
Wide open, a single note turns into a wall of sound, and at low settings the plugin works as a quiet thickener. With all four controls at zero the output is the input, delayed by the 52 samples the plugin reports to the host.
Grainwash
Grainwash is a delay and reverb hybrid with a granular octave shimmer that follows the beat. The shimmer swells on each subdivision of the host tempo and opens further where the source falls away, so the tail answers the phrase instead of covering it. Both behaviors are built in and need no routing. It also has four controls:
- SPACE runs from a short room to a tail of almost four seconds, driving a tempo-synced multitap delay and a reverb network together.
- SHIMMER adds a granular octave inside the reverb feedback and a tuned resonator on its output.
- GRAIN sets the grain size as a note value, from an eighth note down to a sixty-fourth.
- WASH runs the wet path through a tape machine, down to a quarter of studio speed, and sets its level and width.
The dry path stays untouched over most of the control range, and at SPACE zero the plugin passes the signal through unchanged. Reported latency is zero. The tempo pulse of the shimmer requires a running transport.
Pricing & Availability
Both plugins are free. They are available in VST3 format only; the macOS builds are Universal Binaries for Apple Silicon and Intel, the Windows builds are 64-bit. Neither plugin is code-signed, and the download page includes a one-line Terminal command that clears the macOS quarantine flag.
Read More