Built for haunting, future-machine sounds and for playing live. Every preset is levelled so browsing never jumps in volume, and the first eight knobs on Push are Cutoff, Resonance, the two Morphs, Attack, Release, Macro 1 and Preset.
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The short version. The full guide comes with the download.
16-voice unison with five spread modes and blend. Wavetable (16 frames, 24 band-limited copies, Hermite reads), Sample, Grain, FM operator, Modal (struck steel, bell, glass, membrane), Fold and Phase Distortion. Up to 7-voice unison with drift, plus a sub.
Load one file or a whole folder with one sample per note. Stretch time without moving the pitch, freeze on one spot, play the grains, or put the file on a turntable and scratch it with the mod wheel. A spectrogram shows the file with the play head moving through it.
Send a voice, a guitar or any track into Nebula as a side chain. The vocoder makes the synth sing your words in 8, 16 or 32 bands with formant shift. The ring modulator multiplies the input by the synth, a sine or noise. Pitch follow plays the synth at the pitch you sing. Or send the input straight through the effects, tape and radio.
A MIX page with a strip per source: fader, pan, bus switch, mute, solo and meter. Send any source to effect bus A, B or both. Bus and main meters, a master fader and a mono check.
Draw a letter, a loop or a cave and the LFO travels along the line, backwards and over itself if that is how you drew it. The pen's height is one output and its sideways position another, so one stroke moves two things. Play it evenly or with the timing you drew it at.
A Choir wave that opens from a closed-mouth hum through oo and oh to a full ah with the singer's formant, built to haunt: slow movement, breath, a small detune between the singers and a long hall. Whispers, screams, moans, wails, breath and a ghostly throat in the grain library. Ten presets in the Choir bank.
Grain, Sample and Vinyl modes come with eighteen built-in sounds the synth makes itself: choirs, whispers, screams, a bowed string, a glass bell, a breath flute, a felt piano, a low drone, a vowel sweep, a metal hit, rain, wind and a vinyl bed. Pick one from LOAD and play. A Grains bank of presets shows what they can do.
A cassette deck with oxide on the heads, wow and flutter, hiss and a valve stage that blooms under load. A 70s radio on LW, MW or FM: tune off the station for the whistle, the static and the fade. A Mono / Stereo / Wide / Super Wide speaker switch like the one on a Toshiba portable, that throws the sound out past the box. All drawn on the panel, the reels turning and the dial pointer moving.
Right-click any effect chip to move it to bus B, fed by the mix for a parallel chain or by osc 2 alone, so one oscillator can go through distortion while the other stays clean. And a piano roll inside the synth: 32 steps, an octave either side of the key you hold. Paint a riff, hold a chord and every key plays it, locked to Live's grid. Feed it into the arpeggiator for ratchets and octaves on top.
Type "warm slow pad" or "bright plucky" and the browser ranks every preset by measured brightness, attack, decay, sustain, noise, bass and motion. Or give it any audio file and Nebula builds a preset from it: the timbre into a wavetable, the envelope, filter and noise set from what it hears.
Write a wave as a formula in x and t, or import any audio file and Nebula lifts 16 cycles through it into a wavetable. Then warp it in the harmonics: tilt, odd, stretch, comb, shift and smear, next to the phase warps Sync, Bend, Mirror, Quantize, Squeeze and Pulse.
Filter 2 runs in series, in parallel with a mix, or split with one oscillator through each. 12 dB low, band and high pass, a 2x oversampled Moog ladder, a 303-style diode ladder, an Oberheim-style SEM, and a vowel formant filter.
Osc 1 can morph into osc 2 harmonic by harmonic, not a crossfade. A voice really turns into metal partway, on one knob.
Every voice gets its own slightly different cutoff, envelope times and level, like component tolerance in a real polysynth. Age adds slow pitch wander and tape wow. Warmth saturates before the filter.
Drag the ten effect chips into the order you want. Compressor with parallel mix, three-band EQ, decimator, tuned resonator, phaser, BBD chorus, synced delay, grain delay with chaos, spectral freeze, shimmer reverb, Gravity pumping with drawable curves, and a finishing chain with tape and a true-peak ceiling.
Four LFOs with tempo sync, per-note retrigger, fade-in and drawable shapes, three envelopes, a pitch envelope, a 16-step sequencer, an arpeggiator with ratchets, four macros and a 16-slot matrix that reaches 78 targets: every oscillator, filter, envelope, noise, layer and effect control, with drag-and-drop routing.
One switch adds a second full voice per note on its own wave, octave and width. The simplest way to the fat sound of hardware.
Motion (sync LFOs, retrigger, 16-voice unison, dual filters), Bass, Leads, Pads, Keys, Plucks, Arps, Drums, Floor, Cinematic, Chip, Vocal, World, FX, Pump, Sequence, Machine, Grid, Rave, Deep, Advanced. Drums is a 909 and 808 kit built the way the machines were: the 808 cowbell and hats are square waves at the circuit's own frequency ratios, ring-modulated and high-passed; the 909 snare is two tuned triangles under bright noise; claps retrigger through a 10 ms delay; ride and crash are the Modal engine's bell and glass partials under a noise wash. Every new preset puts Cutoff on Macro 1 and Morph on Macro 2 for Push. Describe what you want in words and the browser ranks the presets by fit. Hear each one in context: a bass riff for a bass, a line for a lead, chords for a pad, hits for a drum, at your Live tempo. Save your own, favourite and tag.
Every routed knob wears an amber ring showing how far the matrix can push it, with a dot that follows the live value as you play. Drag LFO 1, an envelope, a macro or pressure from the source strip and drop it on any knob to route it. Drop again to deepen.
A breadcrumb strip of your last ten changes: hover to see the knob, click to undo just that one. Put any two presets, or your own sounds, in A and B and ride one knob between every parameter of both. Randomise everything or just one part.
Per-note pitch bend, pressure and slide. Turn on MPE on the device in Live and Push 3 plays it polyphonically.
A full-screen GPU scene on a second display: a nebula, a terrain made of your wavetable, stars for every voice, lightning on transients, beat-synced dancers, and your own footage keyed in. For the stage.
Factory presets, nothing added. Sixteen of the 249.
Full arrangements, a minute or more each. Every sound is Nebula, drums, risers and impacts included. The space is OrbitVerb, running as two send buses with the kick ducking it. Nothing else touched them.
No samples, no drum machine, no mastering plug-in. Each tune is a list of notes fed to a dozen copies of Nebula, mixed through OrbitVerb and Nebula's own Polish chain.
A tune is thirteen to nineteen parts. Each is a factory preset (Hoover, Velvet Strings, Acid Lead, Recognizer Brass) on its own copy of the synth, with its notes written in beats across a 24 to 32 bar arrangement: intro, groove, breakdown, build, drop. Parts fade in, sit back under a build and pump against the kick with level curves, the same thing you would draw as automation in Live.
The drums are Nebula's own Drums bank, so you can play the same kit from Push. They are built the way the original machines were. 909 Kick is a triangle with a 48-semitone pitch drop, a sub, soft-clip drive and an 8 ms click. 909 Snare is two triangles at 180 and 330 Hz under bright noise with hard-clip drive. The 808 cowbell and hats are square waves at the circuit's 540, 800 and 369 Hz, ring-modulated and high-passed. Claps are band-passed noise retriggered through a 10 ms feedback delay. Ride and crash are the Modal engine's bell and glass partials under a noise wash. Toms, rim, shaker, conga and bongo fill in. Drum Stab is the fill hit, Impact the drop boom sent hard into the hall, Crash lands on every drop. Risers are the Riser preset plus a Breathy Sweep noise rise. Odd 16ths swing, and every velocity is scattered a little so nothing repeats exactly.
Each tune runs two OrbitVerb sends. Techno: a short plate ducked by the kick plus an 80s hall for the pad. Rave: a gated nonlinear 80s reverb on the snare. Classical and Vangelis: the cathedral and hall in the 1970s colour with 25 to 30 ms predelay. Dub: a 70s plate and the reverse mode for snare throws. Reggae: a small 70s chamber. The kick keys OrbitVerb's ducker so the reverb breathes with the beat.
Filter cutoff and resonance ride the sections on the acid lines, the disco sequence and the Vangelis brass. Spectral morph position drifts across the techno pad. The dub skank's delay mix jumps to 95 % on the last beat of every fourth bar for the throws. The summed mix goes once through Nebula's Polish chain: warmth, air, width, tape and the true-peak ceiling. That is the whole master.
The disco tune nods to the pulsing sequenced bass of late-70s electronic disco, the Vangelis tune to the China album, Kettle Corn to the bouncy Moog novelty hits of the early 70s, and the intro to a 1991 machine-age film theme. Patterns, motifs and melodies are our own. Every preset named is in the factory banks, and the drum settings above are a handful of knobs each.