Untamed Audio  ·  The Garden  ·  No. 1

Lovely

A Leslie you can step on

A painted marigold with a butterfly over it

Lovely is a rotary speaker built around the thing that makes a real Leslie so addictive: the horn and the drum don't move together. The horn gets up to speed quickly. The drum takes its time. Change speeds and the two rotors drift apart before settling back into sync — that swell and wobble is the whole effect.

It models the entire signal path: tube drive, two rotors, a stereo pair of microphones, and the cabinet around them. No LFO pretending to be a rotor. No instant speed changes. It sounds like a rotary speaker in a room, because that is what is being computed.

A painted marigold
Speed — slow, wide chorale to fast tremolo. The rotors have their own inertia: push the control and the horn gets there first, the drum follows. That little disagreement is where the magic is.
A painted lotus on its pad
Drive — lean on the tubes ahead of the cabinet, from a warm push to a proper bark.
A painted morning-glory vine
Balance — blend drum against horn. More drum for weight, more horn for shimmer, somewhere in the middle for the classic sound.

Try it

Fully playable, right here. Turn the knobs, hit the switch, change the speed — listen to what happens.

Headphones recommended. Start at chorale speed with a neck pickup and let the rotors do their thing.

A painted luna moth under a blacklight A painted peacock feather under a blacklight

Then the lights go out

You may have noticed the garden going dark on the way down. Same flowers, same layout, same pedal — every dark state is made from its lit one, so nothing moves. Only the light changes.

The pedal does it too, and it does it to the sound. Press the pool under the horn and Lovely drops into a darker room: a concrete basement, a tape machine, and the same cabinet running somewhere in it. It's a different place to play.

Coming soon

Mac · iPad · PC

Two rotors. Real inertia. The whole cabinet modelled. No LFO anywhere in it — just a pair of speakers that don't quite agree with each other.