Non-linear plugins for non-linear people.
Boutique plugins. Each one starts from the physics of a real device, then takes it somewhere the hardware never went: familiar enough to reach for, different enough to keep.
Start with the real thing. Then improve on it.
Built from real parts
Under each plugin is a model of something physical: tubes with a real plate voltage and load, tape moving past heads at a real speed, parts that drift off-value as the room warms. Turn a knob and you are changing what the part would do, not bending a curve.
A colour for every job
Drive is orange, tone is blue, dynamics amber, time violet. Each plugin wears its family's colour and nothing else, so a session full of them reads at a glance.
Ideas the hardware never had
Then we take liberties. Drag OXIDE's tape heads to retime the echo. Wire FABRICA's tubes in any order you like. Let RIDER write the vocal ride and redraw only the moves it got wrong. Familiar tools, with one idea each that the original could not manage.
Seven families. Five plugins to start, more in the lab.
- UTILITYAnalysis, gain, routing, metering
Nothing announced yet
A free plugin that ages while it runs.
A tone stack, a coupling capacitor and a soft clipper, with parts that start off-value by their tolerance, drift as the room warms and cools, and wear as the session goes on. Lock the seed and every render comes out the same. No code, no reminder, and it stays free.
An effect on its own
Pick an era from the 1950s to modern, set how loose the tolerances are and how fast things drift, and let tone and saturation move the way old gear does.
The conductor
RIDER, OXIDE, FABRICA and HEEL each have a link switch. Linked plugins take their drift, tolerance, seed and room temperature from one ENTROPY, while each keeps its own circuit: OXIDE stays tape, FABRICA stays tubes.
Never a requirement
Every plugin is complete without it. Open a linked session on a computer without ENTROPY and each plugin carries on with the last settings it was given.
New plugins, and news from the lab.
We'll write when a plugin leaves the lab, and now and then with news from Barkhausen Labs.
No spam. Spam is for eggs.
Named for a physicist who heard magnets crackle.
Heinrich Barkhausen (1881 to 1956) was a German physicist who taught in Dresden. In 1919 he wound a coil around a piece of iron, wired it through an amplifier to a speaker, and brought a magnet close. Instead of silence he heard crackling: the tiny magnetic regions inside the iron were flipping in sudden jumps. It is still called Barkhausen noise, and it happens in every tape head and transformer, the same physics our plugins are built from.
He also gave his name to the Barkhausen criterion, the rule that decides whether a circuit with feedback will oscillate or sit still. Real hardware, and a little feedback. It seemed apt.