Build a synth. Play it in your DAW.

It is a per-step effect sequencer that runs inside the voice, in the audio path — not on the bus afterwards. That distinction is the entire reason it exists.

Every other unit in ADEF's modulation path is instantaneous. The filter, the compressor, the EQ, the overdrive, the waveshaper — each one answers the modulation value at that sample and remembers nothing about the sample before it. The only time-based effects lived at bus level, after the voice was already built, so they smeared the whole patch instead of dirtying it from the inside. Eric, starting the design: “I could not find or make a preset that is Serum dirty, and now I know why.”

The invention is clocks nested three deep. A PATTERN is a musical length — bars and beats — divided into STEPS. Each step picks one effect. DIVISION then cuts that step into SEGMENTS, and every segment sweeps that effect's main parameter from its own minimum to its own maximum, along its own curve, in its own direction. Pull the segment handles down and the effect arrives and then stops dead, leaving a hole — an instant gater.

Eighteen effects — the 303 and ADEF filters, flanger, phaser, crush, delay and filter-delay, three types each — built on three engines rather than eighteen one-offs, so they behave consistently instead of each having its own character bugs.

Reading the preset cards below: a preset set to KEY restarts its pattern at every note-on — that is by design, and it means it will not line up with your bar line. FOLLOW is the mode that locks to the song. If sync is ever the complaint, check RETRIGGER first.