Sylvaris

The rest of the instrument

Sylvaris is a sixteen-voice MPE polysynth grown from the Mutable Instruments lineage — Plaits, Rings, Warps, Clouds, Tides, Marbles and Stages, rebuilt as one instrument rather than a rack of modules. Every voice is a physical event: an oscillator or an exciter driving a resonant body, folded, filtered, and blown through granular mist — and a 109-destination modulation web lets any part of the forest move any other. It plays itself as much as you play it: SEEDS germinates patterns, SEASONS turns them through the year, and the pond turns touch into music. Less a control panel, more a place.

What you just played is the full per-voice chain — ROOTS into HOLLOWS, shaped by FILTER and ENV — with the SEEDS arp on top. Here is everything the demo leaves out.

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  MACROS

  Four macros sit under the pond, offsetting whatever patch is loaded rather than replacing it — neutral at 50, so a preset sounds exactly as designed until you turn one. BLOOM opens harmonics, structure and density; TANGLE hardens timbre and brightness; DRIFT slides grain position, texture and morph; AIR widens blend, grain size and stereo spread. Each one is also a matrix destination, so the pond, an LFO, or SEASONS can play the macros on their own.

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  ROOTS

  Twenty-four synthesis engines in one oscillator — virtual analog, FM, wavetable, additive, chord, speech, swarm, grain, even drums. ROOTS is Mutable's Plaits grown up: harmonics, timbre and morph reshape whichever engine is loaded, and every voice starts here.

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  FORCES

  An Elements exciter in front of every voice: blow, bow or strike. Blow is granular wind, bow is friction noise, strike is mallets and plectra — three different ways of putting energy into the resonator. Level, timbre and contour decide how hard it hits and how long it leans in.

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  HOLLOWS

  Rings, in six models: modal, sympathetic string, string, FM, sympathetic quantized, and string with reverb. Whatever ROOTS sends it gets a body, and struct, bright, damp and pos move that body from wood to glass to wire, before FILTER and ENV finish shaping the note you just heard.

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  FILTER

  Two independent filters per voice, each a full eight-mode set — 12 and 24 dB lowpass, bandpass, highpass, ladder, comb, formant, phaser — with its own cutoff, resonance, drive and envelope amount. SEEDS and SEASONS each pick which slot a line fires through, so two lines in one patch can be shaped completely differently.

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  ENV

  Two envelope pairs per voice, each a plain ADSR or Rings' own percussive LPG decay — and in LPG mode, ENV 2 carries its own fall and colour rather than sharing one shape with ENV 1. SEEDS and SEASONS each pick which pair a line fires with, so a plucked line and a bowed line can share one patch without stepping on each other's envelope.

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  GNARLS

  A Warps modulator per voice, cross-modulating the oscillator against the resonator: one continuous knob from wavefolding through ring modulation to a vocoder. A second GNARLS sits on the bus, and it can be wired as a pedal in a parallel loop around the whole effects chain — folding what the effects made, not what went into them.

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  MISTS

  Two independent Clouds engines, A and B, each with its own density, texture, size, pitch, freeze, feedback and reverb. Both lock to host tempo, run at four buffer lengths and four quality tiers, and can sit in parallel or in series with A feeding B. Every source in the synth chooses where it goes: dry, A, B, or both.

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  MB FILTER

  A stereo filter pair across the whole mix, after the effects and before the limiters. Eight modes — 12 and 24 dB lowpass, bandpass, highpass, ladder, comb, formant, phaser — with their own drive, and an XY pad that sweeps tune against resonance in a single gesture.

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  The modulation matrix

  Sixteen routes and twelve sources — four LFOs, six SEASONS groups, and the GROVE pond's own X and Y — into 109 destinations covering every module in the synth. Drag a source onto a knob to assign it, and the knob draws its own modulation arc from then on.

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  WINDS

  Four Tides LFOs, each shaped by the module's own slope, wave, smoothness and phase rather than a fixed list of waveforms. Run them free, sync them to the host, fire them once as an AD or AR envelope, or trigger them from a note. The curve you draw is the curve you get, and it can reach almost anywhere in the matrix.

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  SEEDS

  Marbles' déjà vu core, driving the synth. Déjà vu takes a pattern from freely random, through a locked sixteen-step loop, to slowly mutating; jitter humanises the timing and drops gates; spread widens the pitch window. Key, scale, rate and octave range keep it musical, and the seed makes any pattern you like reproducible.

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  SEASONS

  Stages as a sixteen-segment sequencer with up to six independent groups, each running its own division and direction. A group can play notes or modulate any destination in the synth, and every note it plays carries a voice profile — FULL, ROOTS or BREATH — so one line can be the whole instrument and the next can be only its breath.