Kilohearts Phase Plant

A sound designer's dream come true

Whether you just installed your first DAW, you're looking for inspiration to follow up that award-winning single you produced last year, or you’ve been tasked with creating the sound of a hot broadsword slashing through ice for an online game, we have what you need.

Phase Plant gives you more options and flexibility than you can shake a stick at, to make things as big or small as you need without compromising the workflow. All in one box.

Clean slate

We want you to understand how Phase Plant works, and what's better than learning by doing? Phase Plant will give you an empty patch and you are free to add the components you need, as you need them.

Phase Plant gives you access to a number of signal generators, effects, and modulators that together gives you the possibilities to create any sound you can think of.

Loaded with sounds

Professional sound designers have been eager to create factory content for you to enjoy. Browse over 400 expertly crafted sounds each with customized macro controls for quick tweaking.

There is an entire category dedicated to technical demos of how to create certain effects, or special techniques. Get up to speed with what's possible by going through and learning the shortcuts to great sound.

Macro control is key

Phase Plant gives you control. Lots of it. In fact, you will likely want to make sure it's easy to change just the most important qualities of your sound via the 8 macro knobs.

Since a complex preset can easily reach hundreds of parameters quickly, only the set UI components are exposed to your DAW for automation and such. If you need to automate a value on a generator for instance, simply bind a macro button to it. You can rename the macro buttons to reflect your configuration.

Signal generation

There are four signal generators and a few utility modules available in the Generators column. Analog, Wavetable, Samples, and Noise. Each one is carefully designed to offer the absolute best in quality, performance, and usability.

Add as many as you like, route them freely. Group them. Hide them. Use some of them only to modulate others. Create layered sounds in an instant. Use generator unison, or global unison, or both!

Snapin compatible

If you ever used any Kilohearts plugins before you'll be familiar with the snapin eco-system of small, no-frills effects units. With Phase Plant these snapins gain even more value as they all go straight into your patches, so you can have your entire sound creation process in a single screen!

If you load a preset that uses snapins you don't own yet they will still process the sound as normal, but you won't be able to tweak any values on them.

Each lane of snapins can be applied to each voice individually (using the "poly" toggle), or to a mixed down signal.

Modular modulators?

Phase Plant's older brother Multipass introduced the Kilohearts way of adding movement to sounds with a clever modulation system signaled by the orange color. Phase Plant takes the concept to a whole new level by letting you add LFOs, Envelopes and others as you need them.

Does your preset require 28 differently synched Random generators? You're in luck!

Find advanced LFO, envelope, random, midi note, pressure, velocity, as well as min, max and multiply modules in the bottom row of the synth.

Try it out

Did you not see the small piano icon in the bottom right? Well, it was hiding the piano bar so you can try out your sounds easily while designing, even if you don't have your MIDI controller connected right now. Like on the train?

And then you hide it when you don't need it to get more space for generators, right? Neat.

All together now

See those numbers and knobs colored in green? Those are "audio-rate modulations", in the same vein as famous FM synths. Except in Phase Plant you can modulate almost any generator value with the output of another one. Try phase modulating a Sine using a Sample as the source. There are even filters and distortions you can modulate at audio rate available in the generators section.

Four types of signal generation

Phase Plant offers four signal generators. You can add as many as you like and route them freely between each other. There are several types of utility modules to allow you even greater freedom in designing your sound such as groups, mixing, and aux options.

For each group, you can add an output module to send the sound to the effects chain, or you can use a group only a modulation source for FMing any other generator.

That’s right, Phase Plant allows for frequency modulation between all types of signal generation! Watch the video below to see how it works.

Your full effect chain in the preset

The snapin concept allows you to use the easy-to-use effects you know and love from the Kilohearts Toolbox as building blocks within your Phase Plant preset. In true modular fashion, you simply add the snapins you need in up to three lanes and mix the lanes individually.

Don't miss the "Poly" toggle at the top of each lane. It allows you to apply all the effects in a lane to each voice individually, even giving each voice unique random values from the Random modulator etc.