Drippers produce droplets at regular musical intervals. You can adjust the interval at which droplets are produced by turning the dripper's handle. As droplets fall down the screen, they hit and bounce off of bars, causing a note to play. Bars can be tuned by adjusting their length. By changing the arrangement of bars and drippers, entirely new musical patterns will arise.

Features

Quantization

Control how tightly notes are quantized to the musical grid using the 'quantize' parameter. Notes can be quantized either to the nearest 16th or 12th note by changing the 'division' setting.

Tempo affects simulation speed

Changing the tempo (either inside the standalone application or in your DAW) causes the whole physics simulation to speed up or slow down, meaning that the musical pattern will stay constant at any tempo.

Scale selection

You can determine what pitches bars may be tuned to with the scale wheel. Choose from one of the many premade scale presets, or create your own scale by selecting the root note and choosing the scale degrees.

Wind

Turn up the 'wind' setting and droplets will start being blown in random directions, leading to a constantly evolving pattern.

Gravity manipulation

Change the strength and direction of gravity to discover new patterns within the same arrangement.

Probability

Introduce random variation by setting the chance that a dripper will emit a droplet each cycle.

Preset saving

Easily save and share preset files containing both the layout and parameter settings.

Synth engine

Droplets features an in-built synth engine, capable of FM, sampling, additive and subtractive synthesis, and featuring multiple effects and modulation settings, allowing you to design unique sounds entirely inside the program. Save synth presets to easily reuse a sound with a new layout.

MIDI output

Droplets can be used as a MIDI generator to trigger your favourite virtual instrument or external synthesizer.

MIDI learn

Most parameters in Droplets can be controlled using MIDI CC. Simply right click on a parameter, select “Learn MIDI,” and move a knob/slider on your MIDI controller to create a new mapping.

DAW compatibility

Droplets can be run as a standalone application, or as a plugin inside any DAW supporting VST3 or AU plugins, including Ableton Live, Logic, Bitwig, Reaper, FL Studio, Cubase, Studio One, etc.

Versions

Each format comes in both a standard and MIDI-only version. The MIDI-only version does not feature the in-built synth engine, and can only be used to send MIDI to other instruments.

• Standalone (Mac, Windows)

• VST3 (Mac, Windows)

• AU (Mac only)

History

Droplets started out as a university project in 2018. It wasn't until five years later that I decided to revisit the concept and embark on the year-long journey of turning it into an actual plugin.

FUN FACT: Originally, Droplets was called Drip. But everyone hated that and bullied me into changing it.

Below are some of the videos I posted sharing my progress on the development of the plugin.