Irish audio plugin company SLM Audio has introduced a free melancholic and unsettling instrument plugin. Conceived as a physical model of a non-existent acoustic instrument, Gleo draws inspiration from coastal post-famine-pre-industrial Ireland, the inevitability of nature, David Lynch, the music of Scottish smallpipe player Bríghde Chaimbeul and Lovecraftian fear of the unknown through the lens of apathy and despair.
It aims to evoke a specific atmosphere, and has a distinctive sonic signature, rather than striving for versatility and more surgical sound design applications – in plainer terms, it “has a sound”. Gleo is fundamentally a resonator synth, where the initial excitation signal is a Lynchian black-noise (ordinary real-life sounds which undergo heavy processing and exaggeration to create a grotesque mirror of the familiar) source. The resonators then subtractively narrow this black-noise input into bands approaching pure tones, whose outputs undergo further obfuscated and arcane processing.
Gleo is deliberately subversive and designed to encourage experimentation and exploration on the user’s part. All of the sliders (aside from “fuaim”, the master volume control) control more than one internal parameter, and in certain cases multiple slider values contribute to a single internal parameter. One of SLM Audio’s focuses lay in making the user’s interaction with the plugin feel dynamic, and reminiscent of playing a physical instrument, with all the quirks and unpredictabilities that come with it. For example, MIDI note velocity is mapped to the gain of only the fundamental frequency of an active note – this allows the user to gently press a key to achieve an effect similar to that of playing harmonics on a guitar.
The instrument’s design consists of several spinning disks suspended on a central column, actuating banks of “strings” with each disk, loosely reminiscent of a hurdy-gurdy. These disks spin in response to MIDI messages according to the octave of the currently active MIDI note(s). This forms the centerpiece of the plugin’s GUI – a 3D model of the instrument shrouded in a layer of shifting fog. The parameter values and characteristics of the audio output from the instrument affect the model and fog layer in various ways, with it ultimately acting as a highly stylized visualization of the instrument’s sound.
The name “Gleo” (pronounced “glow”) is an Irish word for the sound of the sea when particularly mechanical or ominous, foretelling bad weather, from late Irish author, scholar and documentarian Machán Magan’s book “Sea Tamagotchi” – a collection of antiquated and unusual Irish words pertaining to the sea.
Gleo is available in VST3, AU and CLAP plugin formats for Windows and macOS.
More information: SLM Audio
