Audio Damage's Tessera turns any audio into chords that stay in key

Resonator plugins are quietly having a year, with new entries from AAS, Lunacy Audio and BLEASS already on the board, and Audio Damage has just added the most musical one of the bunch. Tessera, released mid-July, feeds whatever audio you give it, a drum loop, a guitar, a vocal, into twelve parallel resonator voices, each tuned to a note of a chord or scale you choose. A single kick hit blooms into a full chord; a sustained pad becomes a slowly shifting wash, all locked to your track’s key rather than ringing at random.

Eleven resonator models cover the territory: a plucked Karplus-Strong string, a bowed waveguide string, and nine banded-waveguide bodies spanning bars, glass, bells, bowls, membranes, plates and tubes, each shaped by decay, damping, brightness and spread controls. The tuning system is the heart of it. Pick a root and scale and the whole bank retunes at once, or play and hold chords over MIDI to steer the harmony live. Five motion engines, Contour, SEQ, Strum, Arp and Swarm, decide how and when the twelve voices speak, from strummed chords to drifting swarms, with tempo sync throughout. A hundred presets ship in the box.

Tessera runs on macOS, Windows and Linux in VST3, AU, AAX, CLAP and LV2, with an iPad AUv3 version arriving on the App Store at $4.99. The desktop price is $49, with a $39 introductory offer, and in classic Audio Damage fashion there’s no DRM, no dongle and no subscription, plus a functional demo limited to twenty-minute sessions.

Producer’s note

Tuned resonators love transients. Send just the top end of your drum bus into one on a return, high-passed and printed fully wet, and you get a harmonic bed that’s already welded to your groove, which beats programming a pad to chase the drums every time.