Perform Your Distortion

Distortion and filters combine with an interactive sound-shaping experience
designed to add movement to your audio.

What can Motion: Harmonic Do?

Transform loops into evolving phrases.

Design expressive filter sweeps.

Distort drum hits with unique character.

Enhance harmonics of 808's, kicks, and basses.

Create morphing textures and atmospheres.

Energize guitar and synth melodies.

Experiment with sound design using your mouse.

Visualise audio with a 3D reactive object.

Motion: Harmonic opens up new frontiers in distortion, filtering and bitcrushing, placing you at the centre of a dynamic and responsive sound-shaping experience. Transforming your audio signal is now an animated, visually-led and creative experience with the innovative and reactive Hexagon controller.

From subtle warming and shaping to intense modulated signal destruction, Motion: Harmonic puts everything you need at your fingertips. Comprehensive parameters for distortion, bitcrushing and filtering take these effects into new creative territory, giving you new ways to play with sound. 

The Hexagon offers six macro sliders that can be assigned to control any of the effect parameters. These sliders then react to a ‘magnetic’ mouse cursor whose path can be recorded or drawn graphically.

The Hexagon: Reactive Animation

Improving upon the concept of the traditional XY pad, the hexagon provides new dimensions of automation, allowing six macro sliders to be pushed and pulled together or independently from each other, in an expressive and reactive way.

The six sliders act as macro controls, absorbing any distortion and filter parameters in the plugin. The sliders are then moved by a magnetic field surrounding your mouse cursor. cursor movements can be played live, recorded or pre-programmed; and then controlled with extensive timing and playback options.

Making the Moves

The magnetic field can be customised for its Polarity, Range and Strength and the macros’ slider’s behaviour can be changed using Hold and Release timing parameters.

Paths can be recorded freely using the mouse cursor or designed using drawing and editing functions. Record a path using the mouse, and you can audition and trim the recording to hone in on your ideal pattern. Designing a path yourself is fully customisable – you can create, edit or remove points, and curve lines between them.

Once your path shape is fully formed, the Timeline provides full flexibility for how it’s played back and triggered. Playback can be looped or triggered by your DAW, and playback direction can be set between Forward, Backward or Pendulum.

You can sync playback to your DAW’s tempo or run the path in milliseconds, and even the speed of the cursor’s movement through the path can be customised, accelerating or decelerating during playback. 

Bitcrusher: Flavoursome Degradation

Set the bit depth and sample rate to bring your signal’s fidelity down, emulating the grit and feeling of early digital systems. Turn up the Dynamic control to focus the bitcrushing effect onto transients and use the Lo and Hi sliders to focus the effect onto a particular band of frequencies to keep the rest of the audio spectrum unaffected.

The bitcrusher can be treated with pre-filters, rolling off lows or highs before bitcrushing for increased signal clarity. It also provides a Mix control to tame the destructive effects, blending the original signal back in.

Distortion: Heat with Feedback

Dial in your preferred flavour of distortion using the Drive and Tone controls, and smoothly transition between tape, tube and fuzz algorithms using the Character dial. Use the Dynamic parameter to weight the distortion’s response more or less heavily to transients in the input signal, or focus the distortion effect on a particular frequency band of your choice.

Motion: Harmonic’s distortion section also houses a Feedback control, adding to the distortion effect with a ringing feedback loop – turn the Frequency up or down to tailor the frequency of this resonant effect.

Filtering: Highlight and Sculpt

When modulated by the Hexagon controller, these high-pass and low-pass filters, with frequency, slope and resonance controls, can provide anything from slow, undulating effects to rhythmic sweeps and chops.

The filter effects can be placed before or after the Bitcrushing and Distortion modules with the Post FX buttons.

The Peak Filter allows you to dial in a symmetrical bank of peaks or notches to replicate complex audio effects like spectral resonance or a shifting phaser sound.

Use the No. control to increase the number of peaks, and the Frequency and Q controls to change their position and shape.

The Contrast and Invert switches add further flexibility and customisation to this unique module’s usage.

Toggle the peak filter and LP/HP visualisers to reveal the spectrum analysers and the curves of the filters across the frequency range.

Features

  • FX Page (4 effect sections: Bitcrush, Distortion, Peak Filter, LP/HP Filter)

  • Cursor, Path and Timeline Page

  • Reactive 3D Visualiser

  • 6 Macro Sliders

    • Per Slider Parameter Mapping

    • Per Slider Parameter Min/Max Values

    • Audio Reactive Envelope

  • Magnetic Cursor control

  • Input/Output Gain controls

  • Safety Limiter toggle

  • Global Bypass

  • 250 Presets

    • 134 Dual Presets

    • 85 FX & Mapping Presets

    • 31 Path & Cursor Presets

Bitcrush

  • Bit Depth and Sample Rate reduction controls

  • Dynamic control

  • Hi-Lo Frequency Range slider

  • Dry/Wet Mix

Distortion

  • Drive and Character controls

  • Dynamic and Tone controls

  • Feedback Amount, Frequency, On/Off toggle

  • Hi-Lo Frequency Range slider

  • Dry/Wet Mix

Peak Filter

  • Peak Number, Gain, Spread and Frequency controls

  • Q with Adaptive Q toggle

  • Peak Contrast contrast and Invert toggle

HP/LP Filter

  • Filter Frequency and Resonance controls

  • Filter Slope dB/oct controls

Cursor & Hexagon

  • Attract & Repel modes

  • Magnet Range & Strength controls

  • Magnet On/Off Mouse settings

  • Slider Hold & Release controls

Paths

  • Record Cursor Mode

  • Line & Circle Draw modes

  • Path Drawing Tools:

    • Select Point/Curve Line

    • Add Point

    • Remove Point

    • Scale/Move Path

Timeline

  • Forward, Reverse, Pendulum Playback Direction

  • Loop Path toggle

  • Timeline Speed graph

  • Fixed/Free Timeline Duration

  • Timeline/Recorded Cursor Speed

  • On, Off, Sync Retrigger modes

  • DAW Sync or Free Timeline Duration

  • Time, Multiplier and Offset controls

System Requirements

macOS

  • macOS 10.15 or higher (Intel / Native Apple Silicon supported)

  • Plugin Formats: VST, VST3, AU, AAX, Standalone

  • DAW's Supported: Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Cubase, Nuendo, Reaper, Reason + more.

  • Compatibility: 64-bit compatible only.

Windows

  • Windows 7 or higher

  • Plugin formats: VST, VST3, AAX, Standalone

  • DAWs supported: Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Cubase, Nuendo, Reaper, Reason + more.

  • Compatibility: 64-bit and 32-bit compatible.

Motion: Harmonic - User Manual