Plugins

I don't really write these. I point Claude at the manual for some piece of hardware I can't justify buying, and a few hours later there are several thousand lines of C++, a CMake file, a GitHub Actions workflow building for three platforms, and a plugin that mostly works.

They are free, there are builds for macOS, Windows and Linux on each project's releases page, and the source is on GitHub.

Given all of that, I am (for the time being) a Sr. Backend Engineer at Zapier.

MIDI generators

Beadwork: A Euclidean drum sequencer. Twelve lanes, one per pad of a drum rack. Each lane spreads a number of beads as evenly as it can around a necklace of steps, and you take it from there: turn the necklace, add and remove beads, accent them, ratchet them, nudge them off the grid. Sixteen patterns per lane, sixteen scenes for the whole kit, and a SCATTER button for throwing it all about live.
Posy: A chord generator. One hundred hand-voiced chord sets, twelve chords each, one per key of the octave. Play them straight, strummed, held or arpeggiated, then drag what you played into a clip.
Dicey: A stochastic melody and rhythm generator. Set the odds for each note value and each semitone, roll the dice, and it writes a monophonic line that follows your transport. Lock it, loop a window of it, or let it re-roll every pass.

Instruments

Stepkin: A semi-modular percussion synthesiser. Two oscillators with hard sync and linear FM, noise, a switchable ladder filter, three decay envelopes, an eight-step sequencer, and a 24-point patchbay with cables that actually work.
Fractone: A polyrhythmic undertone synthesiser. Two oscillators, each carrying two subharmonic dividers, four rhythm generators dividing one clock, and two four-step sequencers turning those whole-number ratios into patterns that drift in and out of phase with each other.

Installing any of them

Every release is a zip (or a tar.gz on Linux) with the plugin inside.

macOS — put the .vst3 in ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3, then clear the quarantine flag:
```
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/Name.vst3
```
The builds are not signed with an Apple developer certificate, so without this your DAW will refuse to load them.
Windows — copy the .vst3 folder into C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3.
Linux — copy the .vst3 into ~/.vst3.

Then rescan plugins in your DAW. In Live, turn on Use VST3 Plug-in System Folders under Preferences → Plug-Ins first.