SCRAPWORKS

VUHWEX AUDIO / OTHER INSTRUMENT VST / IN DEVELOPMENT

Play the wreckage.

SCRAPWORKS turns struck metal, malfunctioning machinery, primitive electronics, and damaged loops into an eight-lane instrument. Build mechanical grooves, cold drones, metallic percussion, or quiet tension—then make the whole structure resonate.

Eight lanes. Four sound engines. One connected structure.

• Every lane can select IMPACT, MACHINE, CURRENT, or TAPE. Combine different engines across the instrument instead of assigning each lane a permanently fixed drum role.
• Per-lane controls cover level, pan, tuning, filter, resonance, drive, attack, release, velocity sensitivity, Structure send, Feedback send, and output assignment. One-shot, gated, and drone behaviors accommodate both hits and sustained textures.
• Drum mode targets eight configurable notes, defaulting to MIDI 36–43. Chromatic mode plays the selected lane across the keyboard. Standard MIDI is the intended route from a DAW sequencer; no proprietary host connection is required.

IMPACT — objects with a resonant identity

• A modal resonator architecture excites families of objects using impulses, filtered noise, or short bursts. Rather than loading a different drum recording for each hit, the design shapes resonant modes and their excitation.
• Object families span steel pipes / scaffolding, sheet metal / oil drums, springs / stretched wires, hollow tanks, glass / ceramics, and wooden beams / crates. These are synthesized approximations of material behavior.
• Material, size, strike position, hardness, damping, brightness, inharmonicity, body resonance, and decay shape the object. Strike position changes the excited mode balance; inharmonicity moves the partials away from a simple harmonic series.
• Hit, scrape, drag, rattle, and repeated-contact gestures change how energy enters the resonator. Gesture Rate controls repeated or evolving contact. Scrape is designed around changing friction rather than a time-stretched impact.

MACHINE — rotation, load, and misbehavior

• Oscillators, noise, amplitude modulation, and resonant filtering form motors, pneumatic pulses, relays, gears, rattles, and uneven cycles.
• RPM and gear ratio establish mechanical repetition. Load changes speed stability and timbre; looseness, friction, misfire probability, and wear introduce related irregularities.
• Tempo-sync and free-running operation let machinery lock to a groove or slip against it. Timbral wear remains separate from sequencer drift so damaged sounds can still play tightly.

CURRENT — primitive electronic circuitry

• Oscillators, filtered noise, FM, ring modulation, wavefolding, sample-and-hold modulation, and unstable tuning provide the electronic source palette.
• Frequency, key tracking, modulation ratio / depth, pulse width, instability, and tone move from pitched bass and sustained drones into electrical chatter, radio-like interference, and piercing tones.
• FM changes instantaneous oscillator frequency; ring modulation creates sum-and-difference sidebands; wavefolding changes harmonic density through nonlinear shaping. These offer different starting points for electronic abrasion.

TAPE — recordings as raw material

• Load user-owned audio for sample playback, with granular playback as an advanced development feature. Start / end, forward / reverse, speed, pitch, loop length, and splice position define the playback region.
• Wow / flutter, dropouts, saturation, and tape wear add correlated instability and damaged fidelity. Short boundary crossfades control accidental clicks, while a separate splice-click amount allows deliberate discontinuity.
• Rhythmic grain triggering, freeze, portable preset export, and reliable sample references are part of the extended design. Missing-file handling and permitted-asset packaging will be documented before release.
• The synthesis engines are intended to make useful sounds without external samples. Factory audio content must be original or appropriately licensed.

Patterns that behave like machinery

• Each lane has its own length, musical division, traversal direction, and swing, with a development target of up to 64 steps. Forward, reverse, pendulum, and random traversal build repeating or evolving arrangements.
• The step inspector combines trigger, probability, velocity, gate, pitch, microtiming, ratchets, conditional triggering, and parameter locks. Conditions such as every second or fourth cycle create changes over longer phrases.
• Mechanical Drift introduces imperfect coordination without forcing extra distortion or tape wear. Keep a steady clock with corroded timbres, or let independent cycles gradually lose alignment.
• Lane-level pattern enable, clear, rotation, locks, Nudge, Mutate, and Rebuild support focused editing. Host sync and a standalone internal clock are development requirements.

STRUCTURE — the frame everything is bolted to

• A shared resonant bus lets several lanes excite one connected body: a warehouse frame, tank, or sheet-metal platform. It adds shared tonal modes rather than acting as another ordinary reverb.
• Size, material, damping, excitation amount, stereo spread, and Structure level shape its response. Per-lane sends determine which objects transmit energy into the frame.
• Envelope-driven inter-lane modulation lets one lane affect another’s pitch, resonance, filter, or distortion. The design favors controlled modulation over unrestricted audio feedback between every pair of lanes.

FEEDBACK CHAMBER — sustain the instability

• A separate nonlinear network combines a short tuned delay, high-pass and low-pass filtering, saturation, instability, and return gain. An Excite button injects energy into the chamber.
• Feedback amount, tuned frequency, and chamber level move a struck resonance toward a sustained instrument. Internal-level monitoring makes the loop’s activity visible.
• The design calls for DC blocking and bounded internal energy, with Panic clearing voices, resonators, delays, and feedback through a short fade. A master limiter is not a substitute for a stable loop. Final safety and sustained-playback behavior remain release-validation items.

Nine stages of destruction, in your order

• Reorder Drive, Fold, Crush, Ring, Comb, Frequency Shift, Tape, Delay, and Reverb. Each stage provides its own bypass and mix controls.
• Drive offers soft or hard clipping; Fold adds amount and bias. Crush separates bit depth from sample-rate reduction. Ring exposes frequency and mix; Comb adds tuned frequency, feedback, and damping.
• Frequency Shift moves partials by an offset in hertz rather than transposing every partial by a musical ratio. It is explicitly distinct from pitch shifting.
• Tape adds wow, flutter, age, and saturation. Tempo delay includes rhythmic division, ping-pong, feedback, tone, and mix. Reverb shapes size, decay, darkness, pre-delay, and mix.
• Oversampling quality and Ruin loudness management support nonlinear processing. Ruin is intended to increase destruction without turning the patch into a simple gain jump.

Modulation with a mechanical memory

• Four LFOs and two random sources provide periodic, smooth-random, stepped, and drifting movement, with free or clock-synced rates.
• One envelope follower per lane adds amplitude-responsive modulation, with attack and release shaping. Route one sound’s activity into another lane for interacting machines and resonant objects.
• The matrix selects source, target lane, destination parameter, and bipolar normalized depth. Route movement into synthesis, structure, filtering, and effects while preserving the underlying control values.

Six editable performance macros

• Mass moves toward larger, deeper resonant bodies. Tension emphasizes brightness and strain. Motion changes mechanical speed and rhythmic activity.
• Decay adjusts sustained energy. Corrosion combines wear, instability, and reduced fidelity. Ruin drives distortion and structural breakdown.
• Each macro can address up to ten destinations, with lane selection and bipolar depth. Mappings add offsets to the detailed settings and can be inspected, edited, or reset.
• Four performance scenes with continuous-parameter morphing are a development target. Discrete engines and choices require defined switching or crossfading rather than interpolation between invalid states.

Randomize the sound—or rebuild the workshop

• Nudge makes small variations, Mutate explores further, and Rebuild creates a more substantial new configuration. Target individual lane sounds, lane patterns, modulation, effects, or the whole patch.
• Sound and rhythm randomization are separate. Locks can protect parameters, lanes, patterns, engine choices, and loaded samples. Optional pitch-scale constraints keep generated notes within a musical framework.
• Saved seeds and Undo / Redo make exploration recoverable. Output volume, MIDI assignments, sample assignments, and safety controls are preserved by default unless explicitly included.

From quiet unease to rhythmic demolition

• The factory-bank target is at least twenty original presets spanning scrap percussion, mechanical grooves, sub-bass machinery, interference, tape textures, cold drones, feedback instruments, cinematic tension, and demolition rhythms.
• Planned sound-design examples include Scaffolding Choir, Freight Elevator, Concrete Lung, Night Shift, Relay Sermon, and Factory After Closing. Quiet, playable patches are as central to the palette as aggressive ones.
• Final preset content, audio demonstrations, supported formats and systems, host compatibility, pricing, and downloads will be confirmed before release.

In Development

• SCRAPWORKS is in development. Features described here cover the instrument design and planned extensions; final specifications may change. VST3, macOS AU, and standalone are target formats, with stereo output and optional individual lane routing.
• Project recall is designed to retain patterns, engine settings, locks, seeds, modulation, scenes, and sample references. Final performance requirements and host results will accompany release information.