Klevgränd - Tomofon

[lofi]

This virtual instrument introduces a new “Audio Model” format capable of containing thousands of waves extracted from ordinary audio files. These waves - and how they’re structured - lays the ground for how Tomofon generates audio, resulting in a highly flexible and instantly expressive instrument. that on one hand sounds very organic and on the other, like something out of this world.

https://klevgrand.com/products/tomofon

/Anders

[Guy Rowland]

Interesting - it sort of feels like an alternative to granular synthesis for turning real audio wavs into something musical (wavetables which can be modulated rather than grains). Definitely one for the sound designers. there's a free demo I see, might give it a whirl at some point.

[Piet De Ridder]

(...) Definitely one for the sound designers.(...)

It's much more than that, Guy.

One reason I immediately bought it, is because it’s quite good at strange vocal-like sounds. I happen to be working at the moment on a few pieces that need unusual vocal timbres, or sounds with a weird vocal-like character, and Tomofon fits right in.
Only bought it yesterday evening, so I haven't explored the full potential of the software yet — not even close — but I already do know I’m going to use this a lot.

_

[Muziksculp]

Hi @lofi This is Very Interesting. Thanks for posting about this.

[srkrishnan]

Sounds very interesting. Will be amazing for scoring!

[doctoremmet]

I also immediately bought this, like Piet and for the same reasons it appears. It is a simple synthesizer layout, with one truly innovative feature: it can resynthesize multi-samples into a series of wavetables, than can then be morphed into eachother. This creates pretty good-to-extremely-wild legatos and bend effects that sound amazing somehow.

I was thinking about the vocal applications they managed to capture in some of the “audio models” they supply with this synth, and was somehow reminded of the gorgeous uncanny character of Xsample’s Vocalquartet sample. This synth is a bit quirky and seems capable of invoking a bit of that character that Xsample libraries usually bring. If that makes any sense ;-)

GUI isn’t resizable. Effects are decent at best. The mod matrix is simple. No assignable CCs so using wind controllers is out of the question. No MPE support. There’s a list of items I’d love to see fixed in a v2.0 some day. But the core of this synth - its raison d’être is pretty unique and capable.

[Guy Rowland]

This is intriguing, I like the description of the wild legatos doctoremmett - would love to hear some examples.

I do also rather like the sound of this, from KVR user databroth:

I did a short demo with it
what's interesting isn't quite the wavetable per key, which is admittedly pretty cool
what's interesting is that it can automatically split an audio you load into multiple tables and give them key ranges that best fit their sound (ideally)

so you can take weird samples and throw them in and get really unique results with ease
each of the examples in my brief demo were made by throwing a beat I made earlier this year into it and seeing what it spit out

[doctoremmet]

There’s a fully functional demo Guy. I wholeheartedly recommend trying that. Only restriction is a moment of silence every minute or so. This instrument is a bit hard to grasp trying to describe it in words. It reveals its strengths almost instantly under the fingers.

[Guy Rowland]

Tomorrow looks like a lazy day (on paper), if it stays that way I'm going to dive in.

[Guy Rowland]

I've made a start. Not entirely convinced yet, I have to say. The problem is that there seems to be a uniform unpleasantness to everything, a very cold teeth-edgyness. Sometimes that can be really effective for something very particular, but I'm not sure I want a whole synth sounding like it. That's been true of all the user samples I've put in, as well as the built in library.

Any softer / warmer examples or tips gratefully received.

[doctoremmet]

I am afraid soft and warm are not necessarily adjectives that spring to mind when discussing resynthesized wavetable arrays in general - or this synth in particular ;-)

I don’t mind the sonic character -as a matter of fact I like it- but if you do mind I don’t think you’ll get much use out of Tomofon.

[Guy Rowland]

I am afraid soft and warm are not necessarily adjectives that spring to mind when discussing resynthesized wavetable arrays in general - or this synth in particular ;-)

I don’t mind the sonic character -as a matter of fact I like it- but if you do mind I don’t think you’ll get much use out of Tomofon.

OK, thanks. I'll pass for now, but it's good to know it's there if I'm doing anything specific in the future that needs that kind of sound and would benefit from its unusual approach.

[Piet De Ridder]

Tomofon has been updated to v 1.1.0 with the following changes and fixes:

- Added window resizing functionality.
- Channel Aftertouch now available as a controller input source.
- New plugin parameter: Pitch Zone Lookup Offset - Decouples the relation between output pitch and pitch zone.
- Added master tuning as a plugin parameter.
- Pitch Envelope nodes can be set to zero (exact middle) by double clicking a node.
- Model visualizations now reflects pitch zone curve settings.
- Model Editor shows pitch of each note played near the keyboard view.
- Fix: Importing stereo mp3 files in certain windows versions does not cause crashes anymore.
- Fix: Scaling a pitch envelope doesn't mess up curve values anymore.
- Added native ARM (Apple Silicon) support for AAX

Download link at the bottom of the product page.

According to the developer: "There's a quite substantial road map for Tomofon, but these things ended up in this first update."

_