Effect Plugins

Each Orbiter instrument also ships as an audio effect plugin (VST3, CLAP, AU). Where the instrument plugin makes sound from MIDI notes, the effect plugin takes the audio on its track and feeds it through the same physical model — handpan tone fields, gong plate, or singing bowl rim — using your audio as the excitation.

When to reach for it

• Drive the resonator with a drum loop and dial in the dry/wet mix to layer handpan-, gong-, or bowl-shaped overtones over your kit.
• Send vocals or a sustained pad in to bloom into a slowly evolving wash.
• Side-chain a gate or transient over a busy bus and use the effect as a tonal "ambience send".

The effect is a real resonator, not a convolution: the source audio excites the modes in real time, so transients and sustained signals shape the response very differently — taps and pluck-like sounds work especially well.

Setting it up

1. Drop Orbiter Handpan Resonator, Orbiter Gong Resonator, or Orbiter Bowl Resonator on an audio track in your DAW.
2. Send any audio you like through it — drums, voice, guitar, synth pads.
3. Open the plugin GUI and start with Dry/Wet at 50% to hear what the resonator is contributing.
4. Input Drive controls how hard you're pushing the model. The default sits in the middle of its range; nudge it up if a quiet source isn't waking the resonator, down if a hot source is overloading it.
5. Stereo Mode chooses between Mono Sum (both channels collapse to one excitation) and True Stereo (left and right drive the resonator independently for a wider response).

Shared controls

These three controls behave the same on every effect plugin:

Per-instrument controls

Each effect inherits the same parameters as its instrument-plugin sibling, so anything you can do on the synth side you can also do here on top of audio input.

Handpan Resonator

Adds the handpan-specific shape:

• Scale, Transpose, Fine Tune — what tuning the tone fields ring at.
• Decay — how long each excited mode rings.
• MIDI Channel — restrict triggered notes to a channel (or "All").

When MIDI notes arrive in addition to audio, those notes drive the same resonator, so you can play melodies on top of an audio-driven wash.

Gong Resonator

Adds the gong's nonlinear plate model:

• Size — plate radius from 0.15 m to 0.60 m. Smaller plates pitch up and tighten the overtone spacing; larger plates open out into a deep wash.
• Strike Position — where on the plate the input excites it.
• Nonlinearity — how strongly energy cascades between modes when you push hard.
• Damping — how fast the modes settle.
• Excitation — overall character of the strike.

The nonlinear cascade is the gong's signature — at high Input Drive the plate "blooms" into higher modes the way a real gong does on a strong strike.

Bowl Resonator

Adds the bowl's friction model:

• Scale, Transpose, Fine Tune — bowl pitches.
• Decay — sustain length.
• Bow Intensity — how strongly sustained input drives the friction "rub" (vs. the "strike" mode).
• Sympathetic — how much the bowls excite each other for richer layered sustain.

Sustained input (pads, vocals) tends to engage the rub model and produce singing tones; transient input (drums, plucks) lights up the strike side.

Routing tips

• Both Dry/Wet and a parallel send work well — at high mix levels the unprocessed signal can fight the resonator, so a parallel routing with the plugin at 100% wet often sits better in a busy mix.
• The effect doesn't pitch-track the input. The Scale (handpan/bowl) or Size (gong) sets where the resonance sits; the input's spectral content determines which modes light up.
• Volume sits after the dry/wet blend — use it for output trim and the in-DAW track fader for level relative to the rest of the mix.