CrowdControl

Overview

Every key on CrowdControl is a pitched sound made out of people. There are three engines. The Resonator lets a crowd recording (murmur, walla, stadium, applause, cheer or laughter) excite a tuned bank of modes shaped like a String, a Bell, a Bar or Glass, with brightness, decay and inharmonicity. The Grain Choir resamples grains of sung vowels, cheers, gasps, laughs, walla, applause and boos to the key, with density, size, scan, spray, freeze, detune and sparkle. Talk is a 14-band vocoder: the crowd's chatter shapes a saw, square or buzz at the note's pitch, so the synth seems to mutter. The Crowd/Machine macro (on the mod wheel too) sets how much raw crowd leaks through. Then the Machine takes over, locked to your DAW's tempo: a 16-step gate with 12 patterns and ratchet, stutter, tape stop, bit crush, downsampling, a frequency shifter and per-voice drift. After the machine comes the Hint, a faint crowd bed with pitched, radio-filtered cheers, gasps and laughs that leak in while you play and go quiet when you stop. Three Warp LFOs move grain scan, resonator brightness and pitch, free or synced. Up to 16 voices, mono with glide, and the RatBells FX chain: EQ, saturation, compressor, OTT, chorus, a delay with a throw pad, shimmer reverb and a ducker. The Swarm display shows a crowd of little people that melt into pixels as you push toward Machine, with a ripple for every voice and a flash on every gate step. Twenty-four presets cover keys and bells (Stadium Organ, Applause Bells, Glass Audience), choirs (Choir of Strangers, Frozen Cheer), talkers (Talking Synth, Chipmunk Parliament, Radio Ghosts), pads and drones, and machines (Riot Arpeggio, Tape Stop Choir, Metal Applause Gate). Every recording in the sample bank is public domain (CC0).

Features

• ▸Three engines pitched to the key: crowd-excited Resonator, Grain Choir and a 14-band Talk vocoder
• ▸Resonator structures: String, Bell, Bar and Glass, with brightness, decay and inharmonicity
• ▸Crowd/Machine macro on the mod wheel: from real crowd to pure machine
• ▸Host-synced Machine: 16-step gate with 12 patterns, ratchet, stutter, tape stop, crush, downsample, frequency shift
• ▸Hint layer: a crowd bed and radio-filtered cheers and laughs that leak in only while you play
• ▸Three Warp LFOs, up to 16 voices, mono with glide
• ▸8-module FX chain: EQ, saturation, compressor, OTT, chorus, delay, shimmer reverb, ducker
• ▸Swarm display, 24 factory presets, public-domain (CC0) sample bank

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