23DSP have released Time Terrarium, available for €19.00.
Time Terrarium is a delay with four habitats inside it. Each corner of the glass holds a different species of echo — tape, ping-pong, shimmer, reverse and four more — and a glowing orb decides which of them your sound lands in. Leave the orb in a corner and you have one kind of delay. Move it, set it orbiting, or let the repeats migrate from habitat to habitat, and the echoes change character as they go.
Plant any of them in any corner. Each has one control that changes what it does.
- Moss — tape. Age adds wow, flutter, drift and saturation, and darkens it as it wears.
- Water — ping-pong. Current sets how much each repeat swirls and smears as it crosses the stereo field.
- Crystal — shimmer. Interval picks the pitch each repeat climbs by: an octave up, a fifth, an octave and a fifth, or an octave down.
- Ash — reverse. Grain chops the backwards repeats into shorter and shorter fragments.
- Frost — melting. The first echo stays clear and the later ones blur into a softer wash; Melt sets how much each pass diffuses.
- Dust — granular. Scatter throws the grains around in time and across the stereo field.
- Pebble — bouncing taps that fall left and right. Bounce goes from an even roll to a stone skipping to rest.
- Wind — a filter sweeping through the repeats. Gust sets how fast and how far.
Click a habitat’s name to plant a different species there, or drag it onto another corner to swap the two.
Drag the orb to choose where new sound lands: in one corner, or blended between several. Set it moving with Orbit — Circle, Figure 8, Pendulum or Drift — over anything from half a bar to sixteen bars, locked to your host’s bar position when it is playing. Four Seasons circles all four habitats in four bars; Firefly Drift follows a path that never quite repeats.
Migrate moves each repeat into the neighbouring habitat on every pass, clockwise or counter-clockwise, so one phrase can come back as tape, then ping-pong, then shimmer, then reverse. Pattern gives each habitat its own echo time: all the same, dotted, triplet, a falling cascade, or spaced by the golden ratio for rhythms that drift against each other.
Press Seal and the lid closes. Nothing new gets in, and the echoes already inside keep circulating and migrating at a steady level until you open it again — a held, living texture you can play over. Sealed Jar is built for exactly that.
Around it
- Time synced from 1/32 to a bar, or free up to four seconds. Feedback and Tone shape every habitat at once.
- Bloom sends the echoes, and a little of the dry signal, into a reverb that grows larger and longer as you turn it up. Duck pushes them down while you play and lets them swell back between phrases.
- Width from mono to 200%. Low Cut and High Cut work on the echoes and the bloom only, so the dry signal is untouched. Mix and Output.
- A lane per habitat under the glass shows the repeats a single note would make with the current settings, before you play one.
Thirty presets in six groups — Essentials, Rhythmic, Ambient, Character, Ecosystems and Wilds — each with a line about what it does. Save your own, and when you want somewhere new to start, Roll throws a fresh patch: orb, orbit, time, habitats, pattern and space, leaving your Mix and Output where they were.
Time Terrarium is available to PC, Mac and Linux users (VST3, AU and LV2).
For more information on Time Terrarium, click here:
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