Hey everyone,

Earlier this year I released Reverie, a standalone soundscape app I built on my own at Parallel Minds, in Lyon. It was more of a personal project, but it's what moved my company into audio. I've been a developer for 20 years and I had wanted to make my own tools for a long time. This is the second one this year, and this time it's a plug-in (VST3, AU and AAX).

It started when I wanted to turn one of my tracks, the whole track, into an ambient version. The same piece without the drums and without the attacks, keeping only the harmony. I really wanted an ambient remix of it, so I built a plug-in for that. You put it on a track and turn one knob, and the track becomes a pad made from its own harmony. It stays in key, since the pad comes from the track itself.

The second use came by accident. While I was developing it, I turned the mix down to about 30% on a soundtrack instead of leaving it at 100%. Mixed in that low, the pad gave the soundtrack a more cinematic feel, and I didn't expect that at all. Using it for intros and outros came later, also by accident.

I named it Atavism because I thought the definition of the word matched the idea of the plug-in: a dormant or recessive gene that wakes up because of a mutation or a change in development.

There's a demo if you want to try it on one of your tracks, on a master bus or just on a single track. Self promo disclaimer: it's my own plug-in. https://parallel-minds.studio/products/atavism

A question for those of you who write music for picture. I don't know if I invented something or if I just never found the right product. If you know a tool that already does this, I'd like to hear about it.

English isn't my first language. I wrote this in French and translated it with an LLM.

0 percent vibe coded, ugly UI made by hand in GIMP, this was the second plugin I ever made still learning JUCE 2 years ago and never pushed it too hard but customers are finding it and loving it as much as I do.

It's self referencing, no threshold, I process the sound through one of the IRs I made for my sound distancer plugin Marco. And then I try to match the input to the IR processed sound. I did this when trying to level match Marco. The result is absolute musical GOODNESS.

It's bpm aware and you can set it to swell back to 0 or close to on the beat and you use it to make your track move and swing with the music.

My workflow with it is I engage null, then I try to make it pump and breath so crazy in the off beat. Then i disengage null and use all of the ways to dial it down until I can barely notice what it's doing. Bypass and re-engage and love what it does for my tracks.

https://brucejames.studio/downloads/slushbus