A batch of new SignalFunctionSet modules for VCV Rack just landed in the Library. Seven of them, and most lean into physical modeling: strings, resonators, and rooms. Here they are.
Strings
Loom is eight strings sharing one bridge, so a struck string rings its neighbours. The exciter is a continuous axis from hammer through pluck and bow to wind, and you can sit anywhere on it. Strum the strings on screen, or drive them from gates.
Slide is an electric lap steel: the same waveguide strings, but stopped by a steel bar instead of frets. The bar slants for chords, and its glide is rate-based rather than time-based, so a wide move takes longer than a narrow one the way a real slide does. There is a swell pedal that fades in past the pick attack, and ten steel-guitar tunings.
SLIDE XP is Slide’s expander. It puts the eight strings on eight jacks, each with a gate in, a velocity in, and a level trimpot, so every string can go to its own amp, filter, or pan.
Resonators and rooms
Chime is an eight-note drone machine, after a xylophone whose resonator tubes rotate under the bars. Each note blooms as its tube swings through centre, the eight rotations drift against each other, and nothing steps. The pattern is whatever their periods make.
Crystal is a 3D echo chamber shaped like a real crystal. Stereo in, quad out, with sixteen crystal habits traced by casting rays inside the shape. The four outputs are four listeners standing inside it, and you can steer where the sound comes from.
Drums
Fill is a drum machine that plays itself. Where Beat is one voice you program, Fill is a whole kit that runs from a library of pattern sets and decides on its own when to break. It is built around pressure: a value builds each bar and vents as a fill. It reads three banks, imports drum-patterns.com files, and its time-signature outputs can retime the rest of the patch through Meter.
Key
Key is a quantizer that takes its key from the patch. It reads the shared Root and Scale convention, so one key change reaches Arrange, Note, Chance, Chime, Loom, Slide, and the rest, and it hands the same key back out. It also does sub-scales, loads Scala files, and quantizes microtonal and non-octave scales without rounding them onto the chromatic grid.
Sharing a key
Chime, Loom, and Slide all read the same root and scale as the sequencers. Key is the module in the middle of that: patch one source of key and every one of them changes key together.
Everything is free on the VCV Rack Library. Browse the full set at VCV Rack Modules.