The measurements behind DeAnalog Synth
Some of the measurements that decided this instrument are below, including the ones that ruled out what I wanted to do.
153 presets in 14 collections
The collections are lineages. Bay Legacy is 34 patches tracing the Bay's synth vocabulary; Funk Legacy is 18 behind it; Bay Bounce is 15; The Town is 5; The New Coast is 11, closing the line at the present day. Every patch is named for the job it does in a track, and the conventions hold across the whole bank: velocity opens the filter, the mod wheel carries the vibrato, the four macros move what that sound needs moved. You can play a whole collection from the arrows without meeting a patch that behaves differently from its neighbours.
The chord engine follows the same conventions. Four of its fourteen types, m9, maj9, 9 and 13, are rootless, because in this music the bass owns the root and the chord instrument plays colour tones only. The voice budget agrees: a rooted m9 is five notes, rootless is four, and the engine allows four.
The filter self-oscillates. It had to be taught how to start
With the oscillators down and resonance up, the filter is the instrument. That singing sine is a sound you play. It worked from the first build, and it could not start.
A pristine digital ladder fed exactly zero stays at exactly zero forever. Real analog starts on thermal noise, so this one has noise: ±5×10⁻⁷, about −126 dBFS, a decade above the measured start threshold, some 60 dB below the oscillation's own harmonic residue, and around 100 dB below normal signal. The seed only breaks the zero; the saturation inside the loop sets the level, which is why 0.0005 and 0.002 settle to the same fundamental.
Ladder measurements
- Self-oscillation onset
- k ≈ 4.0 (res ≈ 0.93)
- Harmonics below the fundamental
- ≈ 57 dB
- Bounded peak, no runaway
- 0.19
- Noise seed
- ±5×10⁻⁷ (≈ −126 dBFS)
- Measured start threshold
- 10⁻⁷ yes / 10⁻⁹ no
The onset is exactly the theoretical Moog threshold. The seed is enough to start the oscillation, never enough to hear.
Ninety-two presets were trimmed to make the library behave
A library that jumps 17 dB between patches makes you ride the fader instead of listening. Level is part of the design.
I measured all 152 presets the bank held at the time, set a house median, and trimmed 92 into a band of ±1.5 LU: the spread fell from 17.4 LU to 3.0 LU. Master feeds the saturator here, so a trim is never only a trim: 27 presets changed character, and I re-auditioned them. The 153rd patch arrived later, levelled to the same median.
Three refused the standard and ship at their original values, on the list for the next pass. Laser Zap cannot satisfy both the loudness band and the percussive-decay cap. Hypersaw Stab clipped worse when raised, which points at its voicing, not its level. Perc Hit's chord runs 4.9 dB hotter than its single note at every setting.
Preset changes are verified by re-rendering every factory preset plus the Init patch and comparing audio hashes. A change that is supposed to be cosmetic has to move zero samples.
Loudness spread, before and after
92 of the 152 presets then in the bank were trimmed. 3 are documented exclusions. 27 were re-auditioned because master feeds the saturator.
Why the soft clipper's exponent is 4
This stage is the only ceiling in the instrument, and it is also most of its glue, the thing that makes a stacked chord sit together instead of piling up. Its curve decides how much colour the instrument has and how clean it stays.
Higher exponents widen the linear range, which is what you want, but this stage runs at base rate in Draft quality, and from n = 6 up it aliases worse than the plain tanh it replaced. Four is the last value that widens the range and still improves on the baseline.
Underneath it is arithmetic: with a low-level gain of 7.92 and a ceiling of 0.99, the curve has to leave its linear region at −18.1 dBFS. Nothing escapes that, so headroom comes from the per-preset trim. The cost is written in the source beside the constant: at −20 dBFS the third harmonic thins by 6.5 dB, and at working level it moves 0.33 dB.
In-band aliasing, measured
| Curve | Aliasing |
|---|---|
| plain tanh | −42.4 dB |
| n = 3 | −50.4 dB |
| n = 4 | −48.0 dB |
| n = 6 | −41.6 dB |
| n = 10 | −37.6 dB |
n = 3 measures better; n = 4 keeps more of the linear range. Everything from 6 up is worse than the curve it was meant to improve.
The panel is rendered
A drawn knob reads as software; a lit one reads as a thing you could pick up. So the panel is rendered: 45 assets, 4.7 MB of them, covering knob bodies and caps, the keybed, the walnut cheeks, and 16 pedal enclosures, four pedals across four faceplates. Enamel, brushed aluminium and painted steel take light differently, so each got its own highlight.
The low-shelf tone control is measured too. 138 Hz at Q 1.0 is the exact curve taken off the Logic channel EQ that was being used on the bass patches before it was built into the instrument, and +6.3 dB was that setting's gain. The range runs to +9, leaving room above the target without inviting damage.
Artwork, counted
- Rendered panel assets
- 45 (4.7 MB)
- Pedal enclosures
- 16 (4 × 4 faceplates)
- Faceplates
- 4
- Automatable parameters
- 136
- Sampled content
- none
The weight in the download is artwork and code. Nothing in it was recorded.
What it doesn't do
These are the limits, in one place.
- Eight voicesA ninth note steals the oldest.
- One filter topologyA ladder, in four modes, and no other circuit.
- Subtractive onlyNo wavetable, no granular, no additive, no sampler.
- A fixed effects chainDrive, chorus, delay, reverb, always in that order.
- Mac onlyAU and VST3. There has never been a Windows build, and there is no AAX.
- No MPE, no microtuningStandard MIDI, pitch bend and aftertouch.
- 153 presetsWhere the big libraries ship four hundred. These are the ones I'd use.
- No undo inside the plug-inLoading a preset replaces what you had. Save first.
If you want the synth that does everything, this isn't it. It does one sound, with the workflow that sound needs, and every number on this page came from a measurement.
Ships 31 October 2026
AU and VST3 for macOS 13.7 or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel.
One reply at launch, nothing else.