Fundamental: Hainbach The VST Plugin
5,0 / 5,0 | 
Electronic musician Hainbach has been working with SonicLab to produce Fundamental which aims to capture all that old test equipment Hainbach makes music on and present it as a thoroughly dynamic plugin dripping with character and possibility.
Hainbach
Hainbach is a Berlin-based composer and fiddler with electronic equipment. You’ll find him stretching tape around rooms filled with vintage test equipment, old German vacuum oscillators, VU meters and knobs the size of your fist. He’s turned the manipulation of electricity and voltage for the purposes of musical endeavour into an art form. Quite how you stuff that into a plugin is anyone’s guess but Sinan Bökesoy of SonicLab is going to give it a go.
Fundamental
This is a sound synthesis plugin that combines all sorts of vintage gear, processors and noise machines that Hainbach uses in his music but into a graspable, creative and usable form. At the heart is a faithful reproduction of a vintage Rohde&Schwartz vacuum tube oscillator which was widely used by Stockhausen. SonicLab then multiplies by eight and bakes in all sorts of complex modulation and stochastic distributions to fiddle around with the parameters.
This sums it up nicely:
Fundamental feels like something Stockhausen, Xenakis and HAL 9000 might have dreamed up after a bender: recalling the past of electronic music through a dynamic modern reinterpretation of a massive german vacuum oscillator.
It looks a bit intimidating but inside you have some polymorphing wavetable synthesis, 4 dynamic wavetables for each voice representing the tiny frequency steps of the oscillator, 4 stochastic modulators for each voice and independent AR envelopes. Each of the 8 voices has it’s own frequency, gain, boost panning and modulation settings.
How does it sound? Fascinating, raw, throbbing, textured and epic would be good words I think.
https://youtu.be/bUMI0vyoBc4
There’s a free demo of Fundamental available for a 4-day trial. Otherwise, it’s available now for VST3, AU and standalone for €49 for a while and €69 after that.
More information
This might also interest you
