Ripplerx is a new open-source, free physical modeling Synthesizer plugin for macOS, Linux, and Windows. People who are familiar with physical modeling synths will find this synth very reminiscent of another commercial one.
Indeed, Tiagolr Ripplerx is not like AAS Chromaphone, but it also sounds like it and has very similar functions. More precisely, the developer aimed to develop a synth that gives you these sounds (Chromaphone/Ableton Collision) but in a free plugin.
Tiagolr Ripplerx
According to Tiagolr, the plugin is a port of Rippler2 for the Reaper DAW. It started as a research project into physically modeled drums and ended up a synth heavily based on Chromaphone and Sai’ke Partials.
Is it now a Chromaphone 3 clone? Nope, on the technical side, the plugin is more on the feature set of the old Chromaphone v1 from 2012 and v2 from 2016.
One big difference is that Tiagolr Ripplerx consists of a single sound layer with two flexible resonator cores and two exciter modules (noise and mallet).
The engine offers nine acoustic resonator types, each consisting of up to 64 partials: string, beam, membrane, drumhead, plate, marimba, open tube, closed tube, and a new squared model. Serial and parallel coupling options are available.
Then, you can shape each resonator core with different parameters, including inharmonicity, tone, material, decay/release envelope, and more. You can excite these resonators in two ways.
First, you have a flexible noise generator with a built-in resonant multimode filter with cutoff and resonance controls and a dedicated ADSR envelope generator.
Alternatively, you can use a mallet exciter with stiffness control and the option to mix the noise with it—just like we know it from Chromaphone v1 and v2.
Further, you can map velocity to parameters. The plugin ships with a bright and dark GUI and is scalable in different stages. There is also a preset browser with a few factory presets, however, saving is not possible.
Tiagolr Ripplerx is a free download from the GitHub repository. The open-source code is also available here.
Ripplerx runs as a VST3, AU, and LV2 plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel), Linux, and Windows.
More information here: Github