SINE MACHINE Review
Melatonin Audio have released their first plugin, Sine Machine, an fun and simple 36 partial additive synth. As a big fan of additive synthesizers, I’ve been following this one for well over a year now, I reached out to Melatonin before a beta was even available and eventually got to test and make presets for Sine Machine. The colorful, and mostly purple, UI is quite different from most software designs, sliders in place of any knobs invokes the vibes of stranger synths such as Absynth and Plasmonic. Each page displays the partials from a different perspective, giving a nice variety of data visualization.
Sine Machine consists of five pages for sculpting various aspects of the additive engine: Volumes lets you define the gain of each partial.
Envelopes gives you the classic additive trick of skewing the attack and decay of each partial.
Trem applies volume modulation per partial which can be offset into a variety of patterns
Pitch controls frequency modulation up to 500hz, a fair bit into the audible spectrum
Voices is the last tab giving you a reverb, glide, unison, and other voice settings
A unique control motif appears across Sine Machine, a small box full of lines that become a rainbow when hovered. This box is one of the key control elements of sine machine, it is an XY editor that sets the intensity of its respective control per partial. Dragging up and down curves the control into either a peak or a valley, with left and right motion shifting fulcrum across the frequency spectrum. This simple controller makes for such a simple way to spread values per partial avoiding the tedious effort of manually setting them one by one.
I had a lot of fun making presets for Sine Machine, it is great for wild and weird cacophonies of frequencies. It makes good pads as well, especially in conjunction with the additive reverb. The stiffness control allows you to offset each partial outside of the harmonic series, I do wish this control had the rainbow spread box, or at least a wider range. I also wish there was a bit of modulation, while yes, there is per partial modulation, I’d love to be able to apply simple LFOs to some of the onboard controls. I think a delay and maybe some distortion would go a long way too. I hope Melatonin continues to make instruments, perhaps maybe even more additive stuff but designed to focus on bass and leads.
You can pick up Sine Machine from Melatonin’s site here: https://melatonin.dev/