vimsynth

a modular synthesizer that lives entirely in your terminal. patch cables, real audio out, sample-accurate sequencing — driven by the keyboard, in the grammar your hands already know.

record a transition, don't program it

the new macro builder works the way you actually make a transition: by ear. press q and turn knobs until the drop sounds right — every knob you touch is marked as part of the take. press q again and the take becomes a set of automations sharing one musical envelope: which bar it starts on, how many bars it sweeps over, what curve.

• @a fires it — every move lands on the same downbeat, to the sample.
• each captured knob is an ordinary automation underneath: open the timeline and fine-tune any one of them.
• macros chain. a swell can name its drop — when the swell lands, the next macro fires on that exact pulse. an eight-bar build that cuts itself dead on the downbeat is two takes and one @.

automation that counts in bars

an automation is not a ramp in milliseconds — it is musical time. the UI resolves "next bar, over four bars" to a pulse number and the engine waits for it, so a sweep lands on the downbeat no matter when you pressed the key. change the tempo mid-sweep and it still finishes on the bar it was aimed at.

51 modules

sources, processors, modulators, utilities, sequencing — a real rack, not a toy. a nord-drum-style percussion voice (PUNCH), a vactrol low-pass gate (LPG), tape echo with wow and flutter (TAPE), granular clouds, euclidean and topographic drum sequencers, a quad VCA with a mix bus, resonators, wavefolders — and one buffer type throughout, so anything patches into anything at audio rate.

describe a sound, get a patch

press / and ask in plain english — "a plucky acid bassline in Phrygian" — and an LLM hands back a patch: real modules, real cables, real knob values, validated against the same rules that guard the audio thread, and already playing. the model reads a formal ontology of the whole rack — every port, every knob, every idiom — so what comes back is a patch, not a guess.

this is not another patch canvas

VCV Rack and Max are paintings of signal flow — you build them with a mouse, and on stage you perform them with a mouse. vimsynth is a text editor's idea of a synthesizer:

• no mouse. hjkl walks the rack, i steps inside a module, a cable is two keystrokes. speed you already trained.
• patches are plain text. human-readable, hand-editable, diffable — your rack has a git history.
• it runs where a terminal runs. ssh into the studio machine. no GPU-bound UI idling at 60fps for a knob to move.
• performance mode is keys, not clicks. every knob, scene, mute and macro bound to the letter it sits under — the screen is a picture of your hands.
• no GC, no locks, no allocation on the audio thread. two threads in Rust with a lock-free ring between them. the callback never waits for the UI, ever.
• the LLM is built in, not bolted on — it speaks the rack's own ontology, and its output goes through the validator like everything else.

get on the list

:notify you@domain.com — from this page's own command line. one email when it ships, nothing else.