Audio Input

The harp can be played by sound as well as by wind. Your DAW can feed audio into the plugin -- a voice, a guitar, a field recording, a whole mix -- and blend it in with the drone.

It is off until you ask for it, twice over. The plugin's audio input starts switched off, and the input itself starts disconnected, so nothing you have already saved sounds any different. To use it you need to do two things:

1. Route audio to the plugin in your DAW. How you do this depends on the host -- in most it is a sidechain or side-chain input on the plugin's slot. Some hosts connect it for you the moment you open the plugin; that on its own still changes nothing, because of step 2.
2. Switch the input on with Audio In On. Until that moves, the input is silent.

Once it is on, Audio In Route decides what the input does.

Strings -- the harp resonating what you play into it. This is the setting the input starts on, and the interesting one. Your audio is fed into the twelve strings the same way the wind is, so they ring in sympathy with it -- through the materials, the tuning, the mutes, the coupling and the body you already have set up. Play a voice, a drum loop or a pad into it and you hear your harp answering it, not a filter. Bring Audio In Drive up for more of it. The sound you get is your patch's, so it changes completely when you change preset, retune a string or mute one.

Two things are worth knowing. You do not need Audio In Direct up to hear this -- with Direct at zero you hear only the harp ringing, and nothing of the input itself, which is often what you want. And the wind does not have to be blowing: turn Wind right down and the strings live entirely off what you play into them, which is the plugin used as a resonator rather than as a drone.

Body -- playing through the box. The input goes into the hollow wooden body instead of the strings, so it takes on the cabinet colour of whichever Body shape you have chosen, without the strings pitching it. A quicker, plainer effect than Strings, and a good one on a full mix.

FX sends the input to the reverb and delay only, and Modulate adds nothing to the mix at all -- it is the route to pick when the only thing you want the input to do is drive a control, which is the next section. Whichever route you pick, Audio In Direct independently sets how much of the raw input you hear alongside the drone -- so on Strings or Body you can have the resonance alone, the input alone, or any blend of the two.

Letting the input drive the wind. Whatever route you choose, the plugin also listens to how loud the incoming audio is and can use that to move one of the harp's own controls. Turn Audio In Env Amount up and the control named by Audio In Env Target rises and falls with the input: sing louder and the wind gets up, stop and it settles again. Wind is where it starts and is the one to try first -- the harp gusts in time with what you play into it -- but you can point it at Gust, Turbulence, Brightness, Body or Sympathy instead.

Audio In Env Attack and Audio In Env Release set how quickly it reacts and how slowly it lets go. Short values chase every syllable; longer ones follow the shape of a phrase. The release is longer than the attack to start with, so the harp swells with you and eases back rather than chattering.

Two things worth knowing. This works on every route, not just Modulate -- so a single vocal can ring the strings and drive the wind at the same time. And it never actually moves the on-screen control or writes anything into your preset: the lean is live only, so your patch is exactly as you left it, and your DAW's automation lanes stay clean. What the input is doing to the sound also pauses for a moment while you change preset, then picks up again -- the same way the pitch-bend wheel behaves.

Letting the input play the harp. The other thing the plugin can do with an incoming sound is listen for hits in it. Switch Audio In Trigger On on and every time the input jumps above Audio In Trigger Threshold the harp responds -- either by plucking a string or by pushing a gust of wind through it, whichever Audio In Trigger Action is set to. Feed it a drum loop and the harp plays along with it; clap, or tap the desk in front of a microphone, and it answers.

Pluck is the setting it starts on. Each hit plucks a string, and successive hits walk along the harp rather than landing on the same string over and over -- a hit carries no pitch of its own, so there is nothing to aim it with, and spreading them sounds like the wind picking out different strings. A muted string is skipped, so you can choose which strings the hits are allowed to land on by muting the rest. Gust instead pushes a swell of wind through the whole harp on each hit, which is a broader, slower answer than a pluck.

How hard you hit it matters. A loud hit plucks harder than a quiet one, so playing dynamics carry through. The threshold is what decides which hits count: set it low and the harp responds to everything including the room; set it high and only the deliberate hits get through. After each hit the harp waits a moment before it will fire again, and the level has to fall well back down first, so one hit is one hit however ragged it decays.

Where the controls are. The input's switch, value and faders button sit under IN at the far left of the FX strip, before the thin dividing line that separates them from the reverb and the delay -- source first, then the chain the sound passes through. The switch turns the input in and out where it sits, and the value tells you the trim and the route at a glance; drag it left or right to set the trim. Click the faders button beside it and the audio input panel opens, holding everything below in four groups:

• INPUT -- the on switch, the trim, where it sits in the stereo field, the polarity flip and the two tone trims.
• ROUTE -- where the input is sent, how hard it drives the harp, and how much of it you hear directly.
• FOLLOWER -- how far the input's loudness drives one of the harp's own controls, which control, and how quickly it reacts and lets go.
• TRIGGER -- whether hits in the input play the harp, how loud a hit has to be, and what each hit does.

The three option dials -- Route, the follower's Target and the trigger's Action -- work like the Material and Pan Layout knobs: click a name around the top to choose it, or click the dial for the full list (Target shows only its current choice, so click the dial to pick another). Around the dial, Route shortens Modulate to MOD and Target shortens Sympathy to SYMP; the list uses the full names.

Across the top of the panel is a scrolling picture of the incoming sound, so you can see what is actually arriving before you start setting levels. The red line across it is the trigger threshold: drag it up or down to set how loud a hit has to be, and watch which peaks reach past it. The line is live only while Trigger is on; the rest of the time it sits dark, out of the way.

A second, pale line runs through the picture too. It shows the follower -- the incoming sound as Attack and Release smooth it -- so you can see how quickly it rises on a hit and how slowly it lets go. A hit fires when this pale line rises to the red one, and it has to fall well back below the line before it can fire again -- which makes it the easiest way to set the threshold and the timing together. It is lit whenever the follower is in use (Amount above zero, or Trigger on) and sits faint otherwise.

Controls that cannot do anything are greyed out rather than left to mislead you -- Drive and Direct when the route is Modulate, the follower's target when Amount is at zero (and its Attack and Release too, unless Trigger is on, since a hit is timed by the same follower), and the threshold and action (and the line on the picture) when Trigger is off.

Everything is still available from your DAW's own list of the plugin's controls too, so you can automate any of it.

The input goes through the plugin's reverb and delay along with the drone, so an effect you switch on treats both as one sound rather than leaving the input dry on top.

Changing preset while audio is playing into it does not interrupt the resonance. The harp crosses over from the old patch's strings to the new one's without a gap, so a voice you are resonating keeps ringing through the change rather than dropping out in the middle of a take.

Bypass passes audio through. Once you have routed audio in and switched Audio In on, bypassing the plugin passes that audio straight to the output instead of going silent -- a bypassed plugin behaves like a piece of wire, which is what a bypass on an effect slot is expected to do. If you have not switched Audio In on, bypass is silent exactly as before. The switch matters here because some DAWs connect the input for you without being asked, and a bypassed instrument should not start playing something you never chose to feed it.