Mononoke

What it does

A soundscape synth with eight keys in place of a keyboard, four a side of a split down the middle, each side’s knobs mirrored above its own keys. Sliding up a key raises its volume, moving sideways shifts its pitch, and a hold button under each one sustains it, so chords and drones stack up by hand. Each key has a feedback knob that feeds the key beside it, with a master fine tune in the middle, plus warp and growl, shape, tremolo and vibrato with rates, an envelope and filter, and ambience, mood and fold. An autofill sets the eight pads to a chromatic, major or minor scale in a chosen key, and MPE and ordinary MIDI controllers both play it, the eight keys repeating upward.

In the demo

Jade turns the camera onto her hands, holds four keys down and drives the other two into feedback, then works through presets including cracked surface, dense forest and first snow on Fuji San.

Worth knowing

It runs standalone or as an AUv3. Nothing here plays like a piano, so anyone after a conventional keyboard instrument is in the wrong app.