ABDCTN

Every science-fiction film had a sound department, and somewhere in it stood a synthesizer. ABDCTN is that synthesizer, rebuilt for your phone and your iPad: not a collection of recordings of those sounds, but the machine that makes them. Theremins, saucers, tractor beams, alarms, talking computers, and everything in between, generated live from oscillators, filters and envelopes. Each sound is a starting point, yours to bend, stretch and rebuild until it is one nobody has heard before. THE PICTURE IS THE INSTRUMENT There are no knobs, no sliders, no menus. The whole screen is a farm at night, and everything on it is a control. The fence is the keyboard: planks are white keys, flower pots are black keys. The alien on the left is the envelope: pull its body for attack, stretch its neck for decay, lift and reach its hands for sustain and release. The alien on the right is the filter. Lift the cow's tail to detune, lift the whole cow into the beam and the reverb grows. Slide the barn door for volume. Raise the chimney for drive. Tap the hayloft window to crush the bits. The clouds are the LFO: how much, how fast, what shape. Drag the saucer higher and the echo follows. Tap a light on the saucer to choose a sound, tap the moon to change the bank. THE RAY GUN A ray gun hangs next to the moon, and it makes the farm play itself. Tap the gun to choose the ray's speed. Light blue sweeps every second, cyan every three seconds and pink every ten. Tap once more for static, which erases. Hold the gun and it comes off its hook. Point its tip at anything on the farm, and whatever lights up yellow can be hit: an alien's legs, neck or either hand, the cow or her tail, the saucer's dome, the barn door, the chimney, the hayloft window or a cloud. Let go and that part turns the ray's colour. It then sweeps from one end of its range to the other on its own, in time with the sound. The filter opens and closes, the cow floats up into the reverb and sinks back, the window flickers the crusher on and off, and the third cloud steps through the LFO shapes. Shoot as many parts as you like, each at its own speed. Touch a swept part and it holds still under your finger. Shoot a part with static to stop its ray, or double-tap the gun to clear every ray on the sound. Rays are saved with each sound and in your presets. In a host, every ray is an automatable parameter. Every edit is remembered per sound. Hold a light to take a sound back to the factory. A REAL SYNTHESIZER Two oscillators with band-limited saw and pulse, an endless Shepard stack for lifts that never stop rising, noise and ring modulation. A state-variable filter that sweeps from low-pass through band-pass to high-pass, with envelope, key tracking and LFO. Real stereo: the oscillators spread across the field, voices sit where their keys are, a ping-pong tape echo bounces between the speakers, a spring-like reverb on each side. IN THE STUDIO Works as an AUv3 instrument in AUM, Drambo, Logic Pro, GarageBand and other hosts, with the same picture inside the host and every control exposed as an automatable parameter. MIDI 2.0 with full MPE: per-note pitch bend, pressure and timbre, so expressive controllers play it the way they were meant to. A hold latch keeps chords sounding with no fingers on the screen, and the instrument keeps playing in the background from a MIDI keyboard. Save and load your own presets from the transmission log. Pay once, own it. No subscription, no ads, no account, no tracking, nothing leaves your device. Somewhere a cow is rising slowly into the light. She sounds wonderful.