Modular devices

Instruments and effects are patches: modules on a graph, wired with cables, with a panel of your own design.

A device is built from modules: oscillators, filters, envelopes, LFOs, delays, a pan, a compressor, a 24-band EQ, and the inputs and outputs that connect the device to the rack around it. Modules are wired together on a graph, and everything on a cable is a voltage. Audio and control travel on the same stereo cables, and the receiving module decides what a signal means: an oscillator reads its pitch input as volts per octave, an envelope thresholds its gate input. A modular's conventions, without the patch cables in the way.

The device editor's graph: module nodes wired together with audio and control cables — The graph. Blue cables carry audio, amber cables carry control; the module browser is on the left.

The panel

The graph is the wiring. The panel is the face: you drag the device's controls from the browser onto a canvas, group them into labelled regions, and choose a widget for each, so a rack shows exactly the controls that matter, laid out the way you think about the sound. Drag a whole module's header across and its controls arrive as a region already named for it.

The device editor's panel: knobs, toggles and menus laid out in named regions — The panel, which is what the rack shows for this device.

Controllers

A device also carries controller layouts: pages of its controls that it publishes over MIDI 2.0 Property Exchange. A controller that speaks MIDI 2.0 asks the device what it has and maps itself, at the engine's 32-bit resolution, with no learn step.

A controller layout page in the device editor — A controller layout: which controls a hardware surface sees, and in what order.

Factory and yours

Phylo ships a set of factory devices, such as a synth, a delay, the EQ, a compressor, an arpeggiator and a chord builder. Factory devices are read-only; opening one to edit it makes your own copy, and every device you save is a version in the same git history as the compositions that use it. An instrument's voice count, legato and glide are a module too, present in every instrument, so they are versioned, automated and modulated like any other control.