by Mat Dirjish
Lunacy, a music software company founded by composers and producers, claims its NOVA plugin platform will translate music makers’ ideas into shareable tools, effects, and virtual instruments. Phase one, NOVA will feature a collection of community-created plugins that work in any DAW, from lo-fi cassette drift to pianos. Emerging features will offer users more ways to build and tweak custom plug-ins and instruments. Essentially, as the platform evolves, the community will be shaping it.
As per its makers, NOVA lets artists, producers, and audio creators craft creative worlds from scratch and share them with a link and/or remix them with other creators in a browser. Casey Kolb, Lunacy co-founder and CEO, explains, “Imagine building any musical instrument imaginable. Once NOVA launches, users will be able to dream up any sonic idea or playground, then turn that into a music tool, and share it globally with a single link.”
NOVA opens up the creative process rather than confining it to a single software environment, such as a specific DAW, or plug-in. At launch, music makers will be able to use instruments from the company’s collection and from the company’s partners collections that will work on the web and in DAWs. Post project creation, anyone will be able to play it, remix it, or use it in their own projects via the free, cross compatible host plugin.
NOVA is launching with dozens of virtual instruments, many of them free to play with. These include unique takes on traditional instruments and synthesizers that produce specific and unexpected results. NOVA Community plugins include:
- Zephyr Strings: a dual-layer multi-sampled string instrument built from real Budapest Strings recordings. A single Intensity macro crossfades dynamics and brightness for expressive, mod-wheel-ready control.
- Good Vibes: a four-velocity-layer sampled vibraphone with zero synthesis. A Sparkle macro layers reverse delay, rotor tremolo, and pitched granular texture on top.
- Woodland Piano: a four-dynamic-layer sampled upright piano with modeled key-release and pedal noise. A Wonder macro drives a self-cascading granular delay for octave-climbing shimmer.
- Growl: a heavy growl bass engine with a monophonic synth built on dual oscillators, a four-op FM matrix, and a resonant bandpass filter. One Growl macro sweeps cutoff, pitch, and bit-crushing together, straight from a mod wheel.
- Gleam: a modal resonator synth. Six tunable partials per voice ring out struck-metal tones with tails up to 20 seconds. Layered with real found-object one-shots and an 11-pattern arpeggiator for texture beyond the keys.
- Drift Cassette: a dual-deck multi-sampler spanning more than 60 instrument packs, crossfaded by a slow drift generator. A nine-unit rack of tape saturation, bit-crushing, and reverb turns clean samples into lo-fi character.
- Anima: an eight-voice phase-distortion synth with two nonlinear oscillators, wave-folding, and audio-rate feedback. Four recordable LFOs and a full mod matrix route motion to nearly a hundred destinations.
- Swarm: a unison synth stacking up to 16 detuned voices per oscillator across 16 distinct spread modes. Built-in chord generation and a reorderable effects rack turn single notes into massive pads.
- Silhouettes: five distinct synthesis and sampling engines, from FM sines to additive bells to hybrid multi-samples, sharing one XY-pad interface. Each scene runs its own heavily modulated delay and reverb chain for deep ambient texture.
- Chiptuner: a single-oscillator chip synth with 16 waveforms, including band-limited NES-style pulses and additively rebuilt wavetables. A tempo-synced arpeggiator and dual-stage bit-crusher cover leads to bass, no filter required.
For greater gleanings and enlightenment, peruse the NOVA overview.
