What if you could turn your selfies, meme collections, or holiday photos into a playable wavetable instrument? Turkgyl Ayuz has just released his TubImgSynth, which does just that!
The plugin boasts a powerful synth engine and four LFOS, as well as four envelopes for deep modulation and automation. TubImgSynth features a dedicated amp and filter ADSR functions to shape the sound even more.
Watch this demo video to get an idea of what it’s all about.
The heart of TubImgSynth is its wavetable generator. Drag and drop an image into the interface to immediately create interesting pads, glitchy textures, and evolving chords.
There are two scan modes: horizontal and circular.
According to the developer, horizontal mode “converts each horizontal line of the image into a wavetable, allowing for sharp edge waves”, while circular mode “reads pixels in a circular path, creating seamless, smooth continuous type waveforms”
If that wasn’t enough, you’re able to manipulate the image with automatable affine transformations to morph between wavetables in real-time. There are different pixel interpolation modes for wavetable fidelity as well.
Sounds advanced, but the concept is intuitive. Zooming, rotating, or dragging your images guarantees endless sonic variations. It’s a really cool way to come up with new sounds.
Feeding TubImgSynth into reverbs and granular effects is what ambient dreams are made of. Adding distortion and heavy compression to the morphing wavetables is a one-way ticket to crazy sound design.
Get even more flexibility by using MIDI control and expression combined with the four MIDI mod sources: aftertouch, velocity, mod wheel, and random.
Different oversampling options are implemented to ensure clean high frequencies without aliasing, and the plugin has an oscilloscope and a spectrogram to give you visual feedback while tweaking.
If you like unconventional sounds and workflows, TubImgSynth is a no-brainer. Getting it for free is the icing on the cake. Donating a sensible amount is always an option if you’ve got some cash to spare, of course.
All in all, TubImgSynth is a really cool tool with an interesting concept. While the UI might seem advanced, the image manipulation mechanics make this a very intuitive synth that yields instant results.
You don’t need to be a synth veteran to have fun with this thing.
The plugin works with both macOS and Windows (64-bit), but some Mac users have reported problems with the plugin not scanning properly in Ableton and other DAWs.
The developer has written a guide to bypass this issue on his Gumroad page.
Download: TubImgSynth (FREE)
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