Component-Modeled Drum Computer · Free Plugin
I said NO SAMPLES!!!
And no shortcuts posing as synthesis either. Every voice is a circuit that is actually solved: the snare is two resonator shells beating against each other, the hats are six real square-wave oscillators clashing, and the clap's repeats are dealt by a relaxation oscillator retriggering a burst capacitor, because that is how the original burst circuits worked.
VST3 · Windows 64-bit·Free · no accountmacOS VST3 and Audio Unit are in development.
No samples anywhere in it
A modelled output transformer saturates on flux, and flux is the integral of the winding voltage - so how hard the core is driven is inversely proportional to frequency. A kick is the one instrument whose pitch moves most of an octave during the note, so it does not sit at one depth in the iron. It passes through it.
Measured, not tuned. No waveshaper can do this at all, because a memoryless curve distorts every frequency alike and cannot tell where in the sweep it is. The sub is a clean tap routed around the iron, because saturation trades fundamental for harmonics - the core takes 10.8 dB off a 45 Hz sine at the default drive, and the bottom has to come back.
Hear it
Straight out of the plugin - and in the first one, out of Batholith too. Every sound in them is a circuit being solved, not a recording being played.
Seven voices
A swept oscillator under a real pitch capacitor - the other family from the pinged-resonator kicks. It strikes at 380 Hz and lands at 45, three octaves inside one note, and on the way down it passes through a modelled output transformer. The punch curve is not chosen, it is the capacitor's: it charges toward a rail above the peak and a comparator switches at the crossing.
Two bridged-T resonator shells tuned to an inharmonic pair, the second at 1.63× the first, so the body beats the way two drumhead modes do instead of ringing like a test tone. A hot hit rides the shells into the rail: they compress and bloom rather than simply getting louder. Crack is a separate four-millisecond burst of noise through germanium.
Six actual Schmitt-trigger relaxation oscillators - real square waves with real hysteresis, each with its own component tolerances, so the stack never quite agrees with itself. That disagreement is the sizzle. They share one output amplifier, which is the whole reason the closed hat chokes the open one.
A bridged-T ping at 1.7 kHz with a lower knock resonator underneath, both summed through germanium - the transient softens the way wood on a rim does rather than clipping square.
One bridged-T resonator with the strike bend turned up, where the bend is amplitude coupling in the circuit itself. A slammed fill bends and growls; a ghost note does not. Six tom zones pitch the same circuit across two octaves, the way one voice card once served a whole row of pads.
Noise through a resonant bandpass, with repeats that are not a delay line: a slow relaxation clock re-strikes the burst capacitor four times before the tail capacitor takes over, which is how the original burst circuits worked. The clock free-runs, so the spacing breathes instead of landing grid-perfect.
Hit any of them harder and they do not just get louder. The shells ride into the rail and bloom, the transconductance amps compress, the germanium softens. Velocity reaches the physics rather than a volume knob.
The pattern bank
Thump is our genre encyclopedia - a page for every genre of electronic music, with the drum pattern that defines it. All 237 of those grooves across 17 families ship inside Lodestone as a factory bank. Each one loads its two-bar pattern with the genre's own tempo and swing, accents intact, ready to edit.
Read a genre's page, load its groove here, and you are already producing it.
Two full bars across A and B pages. Click a key to cycle off, on, accent; drag to paint a row. Accents hit harder through the same velocity physics as MIDI.
RUN free-runs the pattern from the panel. HOST is a latch: armed, the sequencer follows the DAW transport, locked to the project grid and tempo, and stops with it - voices ringing out rather than cutting dead.
Every voice answers standard drum notes whether the sequencer is running or not. Play over the pattern, or ignore it entirely.
The honest part
The kick's iron ships with physics tests that draw the real saturation-versus-time curve and pin the clean-bark-clean pass with numbers. The plugin itself is tested through Phonon's own hosting stack every build:
Assertions, not adjectives.
The panel
A walnut-framed graphite drum computer, in the same studio finish as Batholith - and no bitmaps and no theme engine, so it is pixel-identical in every host and renders at any resolution. The sequencer is a field of sculpted keycaps in a dark well that light once for a step and a second time for an accent, with amber lamps chasing the transport, and the display reads out whatever control your hand is on - pad states included - and shows the tempo and step while the pattern runs.
Everything here, plus the kick bench opened to fourteen knobs, a cymbal and a shaker, the complete nine-lane groove bank, and sixty-seven jacks that turn the whole kit into one patchable instrument. Same kick module, same source file. This one stays free.
Lodestone's big brother: TriphammerFree · no account
The kick is not modelled on Phonon's Lodestone module - it is that module, compiling the same source file the DAW does, defaults untouched. The whole instrument is built from the same component library, so the plugin and the DAW can never drift apart in sound. Lodestone is what that library makes; Phonon is the rest of it.
macOS VST3 and Audio Unit are in development.
At a glance
| Format | VST3 · Windows 64-bit |
|---|---|
| In development | macOS VST3 and Audio Unit |
| Voices | 7, all solved circuits · no samples |
| Sequencer | 7 tracks × 32 steps · swing · host latch |
| Parameters | 41, all automatable |
| Engine | Compiled from Phonon's own source |
| Pattern bank | The full Thump catalogue |
| Price | Free |
