Screech Machine

Screech Machine is a three-oscillator synthesizer built for screeches and leads. The oscillators feed a fixed chain of filter, drive, filter, waveshaper, OTT and EQ, followed by a phaser, a last saturation stage, a chorus, a stereo reverb and a 0 dBFS clip. Everything from the first filter on is shared by all voices, so in Poly a chord distorts as one signal, like a chord played into a pedal. A pitch envelope and five pitch contours shape how each note lands, from the classic fast screech drop to a swooping hoover, while a modulation envelope with eight depth pills, two LFOs and the mod wheel move the chain. The init patch is a plain saw with the chain wide open; the screeches are in the presets.

Features

• Three Oscillators, Ten Waves: Saw, Super, Square, Pulse, Triangle, Sine, Noise, PWM, Saw PWM and R-Mod. Super is a 7-voice supersaw modeled on the JP-8000's, Saw PWM is the hoover source modeled on the Alpha Juno's (a saw plus a PWM pulse an octave up), and R-Mod ring-modulates the other two oscillators.
• Unison and Hard Sync: Up to 9 unison voices per oscillator with detune, stereo width and mix, scaled so the level stays about the same as you add voices. Hard sync locks OSC 2 to OSC 1, ready to be swept by the pitch envelope, an LFO or the mod wheel.
• Screech Pitch Envelope: A ±48 semitone pitch envelope with attack, curve, hold, decay and sustain, plus five pitch contours that run on top of it: Drop (the standard screech attack), Dive, Rise, Bounce and Hoover. Send it to all three oscillators, or to OSC 2 alone to sweep a sync or a ring mod.
• Poly, Mono and Legato: 16-voice polyphony, or Mono and Legato with glide up to 2 seconds, and a pitch bend range of up to 36 semitones.
• Filter Into Drive: Filter A morphs from low-pass through band-pass to high-pass with key and velocity tracking, and picks the frequency that screams: a high resonance pushes a narrow band hard into four drive curves (Soft, Tube, Diode and Hard).
• 11 Filter Models: Filter B follows the drive with clean low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, peak and notch types, models of the IR3109 chip, the Moog ladder, the TB-303's diode ladder and the Juno-6 and Juno-106 filters, and an LP FM mode that growls harder the louder the drive hits it.
• Morph Waveshaper: Alien Drive's 256-curve wavetable waveshaper in a 16 x 16 bank, running from clean through folds, harmonic curves, clipping and rectifying. Fold sets how hard the signal runs through the curve, and past noon it folds back on itself.
• OTT, EQ and Effects: 3-band upward and downward OTT compression, an output EQ with low cut, a ±18 dB peak band and high cut, a phaser, a last saturation stage that distorts the swept EQ peak and the phaser too, a stereo chorus modeled on the JP-8000's that can run before the drive or at the end of the chain, and a stereo reverb with up to 20 seconds of decay.
• Deep Modulation: A modulation envelope with eight depth pills across the chain, two LFOs with seven shapes, eleven destinations, Free, Sync and Trig modes, rates up to 40 Hz and a fade-in for delayed vibrato, plus an assignable mod wheel. On a shared target the amounts add up.
• Clean, Safe Output: 1x, 2x or 4x oversampling on the drive and the shapers keeps heavy drive and folding clean, and the output never goes over 0 dBFS.
• Fast Workflow: A preset menu that browses, loads and saves presets and copies and pastes them between instances, undo and redo, a resizable interface from 70% to 200%, adjustable panel opacity to see your DAW behind it, and a hint bar that describes every control.