Reliquary

A resonator that recycles your sound

The rawest buffer-recycling resonator loops one delay line for a single trade-off-ridden pitch. Reliquary runs a bank of 12 short feedback loops, one per harmonic partial of a tracked fundamental. Each loop is fed a bandpass-filtered slice of your live input near its own partial, tuned to exact pitch with a fractional-delay allpass, and given its own decay — so low partials can ring while highs damp like a real string, or the reverse for metallic.

The input only sets strike timing and energy; the loops are excited by noise bursts and ring on feedback alone. The output contains zero dry signal — the resonator imposes its own pitch on your material, so what comes back is pure resonance, never a copy of the original.

Character: one knob, three worlds

CHARACTER bends the partial frequency ratios from perfectly harmonic (1, 2, 3, 4…) through stretched and inharmonic, into dense clusters. String becomes bell becomes drone, continuously.

A microtonal re-tuner

TEMPER morphs the tuning system the partials ring in — pure/just, 12-EDO, 24-EDO quartertones, 19- and 31-EDO, the Bohlen-Pierce tritave, all the way to a stretched metallic grid. SWARM then splits each partial into a cluster of microtonally-detuned voices that beat and shimmer, turning a single note into a living microtonal choir. Feed it a drum loop and get it back retuned to 31-EDO.

Shape the strike

CONTOUR reshapes the strike’s attack in time — from a sharp percussive tick to a slow swelling onset — without adding sustained energy, so it never overloads the resonator. MALLET sets the spectral hardness of the hit, from soft felt (mellow, low-partial) to hard metal (bright, sharp attack). CONTOUR is the gesture, MALLET is the colour.

Twelve knobs

Under the hood