Audio Damage Tessera is a new 12-voice resonator plugin for macOS, Windows, and iOS that is musical and in motion.
Good news: the iOS version is out now for $4,99 on the Apple App Store.
This year, we’ve already received several new resonator plugins, including those from Lunacy Audio, AAS, and BLEASS. Is this a new trend on the horizon that might replace the upteen granular releases?
There’s a new one again. Audio Damage has released Tessera, a new cross-platform resonator plugin.
Audio Damage Tessera
Tessera is a new creative resonator plugin for macOS, Linux, Windows, and soon iOS with an evolving musical nature. Audio Damage is not just a simple resonator processor; it has some goodies that make it particularly useful in musical contexts.
At its core, Tessera uses twelve parallel resonator voices, each pitchable to a note. There are eleven distinct resonator models available: a plucked Karplus-Strong string, a bowed waveguide string, and nine banded waveguide bodies (bars, glass, bells, bows, membranes, plates, tubes, and more)
They are fully tweakable with a handful of parameters: decay, damping, brightness, and voice spread, giving you results ranging from tight and percussive to vast and ringing.
If you feed the plugin with audio material, it uses that to excite the resonators. Instead of a random effect, each resonator can be tuned musically, i.e., assigned a note. You can choose a root note and a scale or even a chord, and the whole bank retunes at once.
This means that the resonators’ glitter and glassy sheen are not random but in tune, making them very melodic.
Resonators In Motion
But that’s not all. The developers at Audio Damage go a step further in Tessera and put the resonators in motion. Five motion engines decide how and when the twelve resonator voices speak and turn a static resonator FX into a shimmering, rhythmic, or drifting effect.
The first is contour, which spreads the voices into a shaped, arpeggiated wave, with adjustable parameters. Then, SEQ is a step sequencer that places each of the 12 voices on its own step of the pattern. Great for rhythmic, repeating results.
Strum gives you guitar-style behaviors. It rakes across the chord like a pick across strings, and all is fully adjustable. The Arp mode cycles the voices one at a time, while Swarm lets the voices weave and drift around a moving center.
The resonators are playable in three ways: without MIDI but in tune with the selected scale, with MIDI input from your keyboard, or via gate where you held the notes.
Further, it has a diffusion effect that gives you reverb-like results as well as feedback that recirculates the resonators into longer, blooming, self-sustaining washes. Micro-tonality is also supported, and there is a vibrato LFO for extra motion.
Audio Damage Tessera ships with 100 factory presets that showcase the kinds of effects possible, including plucks, drones, rhythmic sequences, and more.
First Impression
I’m pleased that there are more and more resonator plugins available. I like them for giving sounds a slightly organic and shimmering quality.
Tessera looks very comprehensive, especially the ability to use different models, and the option to add movement to them sounds very intriguing. Looking forward to the iOS release.
Audio Damage Tessera is available now for 34,95€. It runs as a VST, VST3, AU, CLAP, LV2, and AAX plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel), Linux, and Windows. The iOS version with AUv3 support is out now for $4,99 on the App Store.
More information here: Audio Damage / Apple App Store
Have you compared it to Bleass’s Spectral Resonator?
nope.