User Manual

Pendulum

A touch-first physics playground that plays itself — and lets you play the weather. Hang ropes from a rail, each with an orb at its end. Ropes are strings, orbs are plectrums: an orb sweeping through a neighbouring rope strums it, orb-orb collisions strike a two-note impact, and every orb ticks softly at its swing extremes. Wind, gravity, mass, and collisions decide the timing; a scale timeline and pitch window decide what's possible. The music that comes out is nobody's melody — it's found, not written.

Plugin · VST3 / Standalone Internal String + Chime Synthesis with Tube-Resonator Body 12 Ropes / 8 Colour Channels

Overview

What it is

Pendulum is a constraint-field instrument. You design the world — which scale, how wide a pitch window, how strong the wind, how heavy the orbs, whether events snap to a grid — and the physics finds melodies inside it that you would never play on a keyboard. Your hands matter too: grab, fling, resize, and tear ropes live. But the instrument keeps playing between your touches, and the best moments are usually the ones you didn't place.

What it isn't

It is not a note-entry tool. There is deliberately no pitch ruler on the plane, no way to aim a rope at a specific note. Rope length maps to pitch invisibly (the note label under each orb tells you where it landed). If you want to compose, narrow the RANGE and shape the field; the field does the rest.

Mental model You don't write the melody — you design the world it must be found in. Shape the constraints, then curate what the physics discovers.

Quick Start

Open the Standalone (or load the VST3 in a host).
Press anywhere on the dark plane and pull down — a rope spools out with a live note readout. Release. It swings.
Hang four or five more at different lengths.
In the right panel, raise WIND to ~35. Watch the ropes sway, brush each other, and start playing.
Grab an orb and fling it across the field. Sweep MATERIAL from 0 to 1 to go from harp to windchime.
Tap the preset chip in the top bar and load Porch Chimes or Storm Harp to hear the two poles.

The Interface

Top Bar

Left to right:

PENDULUM: Title block. Tap it to open Settings — see § MIDI Out.
PLANE | SCALE: Page tabs.
PLAY / STOP: The internal transport (Standalone). Dimmed when a host owns the transport.
BPM chip: Drag vertically to set tempo (20–300), double-tap resets to 120. Shows the host tempo (read-only, BPM/HOST) when hosted.
PULSE: The wind pulse interval: OFF · BEAT · BAR · 2BAR. See § Physics.
Preset chip: The loaded preset's name; tap to open the preset browser.
PANEL: Show/hide the right control panel (full-bleed plane when hidden).
CLEAR: Remove every rope. No confirmation: it's a performance action.

PLANE Page

The performance surface. The hatched band at the top is the rail — ropes hang from it. Faint drifting streaks show the current wind gust (direction and strength). Each rope shows its note name under the orb; ropes flash and bloom rings when they sound. The counter in the top-right shows ropes in play (max 12).

Control Panel

Right side, toggled by PANEL. Three live XY pads — drag anywhere on a pad to set both axes at once; each pad animates what it controls:

WEATHER: X = WIND, Y = GRAVITY. The streaks drift with the actual live gust; motes fall at gravity speed.
VOICE: X = MATERIAL (STRING ↔ CHIME), Y = DECAY. Shows the real partial stack morphing from harmonic string to inharmonic chime, ringing as long as DECAY allows.
AIR: X = RESONANCE, Y = SPACE. Sympathetic strings shimmer with resonance inside room rings sized by space.

Below the pads:

ROPE: Rope strength, drawn as an actual catenary that pulls taut (rod) or sags (bungee) as you drag it.
TICKS: The loudness of the swing-extreme metronome ticks, 0 = OFF. The dot row lights up with the level.
FIELD: OCT (−2…+2), RNG (6/12/24/36/48 semitones), QNT (OFF/32/16/8/4).

Values show live on every control. All of it is patch state.

Scale Strip

The always-on strip across the bottom: the scale-segment timeline shared with the other Touchmachines instruments. Segment chips show each key as a mini keyboard; the playhead sweeps them while the transport runs; the active segment's keys light in the rope colours currently sounding each note. Tap a chip to open the segment editor (root / scale / bars / per-key custom scale); drag a chip edge to resize; + adds a segment; the TUNING chip switches the global tuning system (Western 12-TET, maqam 24-TET, shruti, and more — under non-Western systems the mini keyboards become N-division strips and still light per degree).

SCALE Page

The full scale editor (same one as fingerbang / Gravity / Square Machine): circle of fifths, per-channel pitch-activity dots, a 4-octave output monitor lit by what's actually sounding, and the segment timeline with the popup editor. Under a microtuned system the circle becomes the tuning wheel.

Ropes & Orbs

Creating

Press anywhere in empty space and pull. The anchor snaps to the rail directly above your press; the dashed preview shows the rope and its note. Release to hang it — it is born already swinging along your drag direction, in time with the world. Direction matters: pull diagonally and release for an immediate swing.

Grabbing & Flinging

Touch an orb to grab it (focus brackets appear). Drag it anywhere; release with motion to fling. Multi-touch: every finger can hold a different orb, and other fingers can keep creating ropes.

Moving & Retuning

A hung rope isn't fixed:

Drag the anchor grip (the small coloured tab on the rail) to slide the rope along the rail — rearrange the field without re-creating anything.
Drag the rope body (anywhere on the line, not the orb) to change its length live. Length is pitch, so this is retuning: the note label follows in real time (TUNE appears at the orb), snapping through the current scale window. Pull slowly through the scale for a physical glissando arpeggio.

Orb Size

Size is mass, tone, and wind-catch in one gesture:

Tap an orb (touch or click, without dragging) — it freezes in place and arms SIZE mode: an accent ring with focus brackets and a live ×-readout. Now drag anywhere inside the ring — away from the orb grows it, toward the orb shrinks it. Because the orb is pinned while armed, this works no matter how wild the swing was: tap to catch, drag to size. Tap it again (or press elsewhere, or wait a few seconds) to release it back into the world.
Hold + second finger pinch on a held orb — continuous resize with a live ×-readout.
Mouse wheel over an orb — continuous nudge.

Big orbs (up to 3×) are heavy: ropes sag and stretch under them, they plough through wind and collisions, strike louder and darker, and — see § Physics — bend the whole field toward themselves. Small orbs flutter, tinkle, and get flicked around.

Tearing Off

Drag a held orb far past its rope's length: the rope pulls taut and turns amber, the brackets flip to amber, TEAR appears — keep pulling and it snaps. The rope falls off the plane and its voice is gone. Weak ropes (low ROPE STRENGTH) tear sooner.

Tearing is removal Torn ropes are gone — tearing is removal, not mute. Save the patch as a preset before pruning if you might want it back.

How Sound Happens

Three physical events make sound; there is no other trigger.

Event	Cause	Voice
Strum	An orb sweeps through another rope's body	The struck rope's note — bright, singing, velocity from orb speed
Impact	Two orbs collide	Both ropes' notes as a dyad — rounder, with an octave-down sub layer
Tick	An orb reverses at its swing extreme	Its own note — short, damped, quiet (toggleable)

Velocity comes from real impact/sweep speed and orb mass. Orb size darkens and lengthens the voice. Every event flashes its rope, blooms an expanding ring at the contact point, and lights the scale surfaces.

The Pitch Field

Rope length picks the note: short ropes sit at the top of the pitch window, floor-reaching ropes at the bottom. The window is defined in the FIELD group.

OCT: Centres the window (−2…+2 octaves around middle C).
RNG: Sets its width: 6 · 12 · 24 · 36 · 48 semitones. Inside the window, only in-scale notes exist, evenly spaced along the length axis.

RNG is the personality control. Narrow (6–12): only a handful of notes exist, many ropes land in unison, and the music becomes motif — a real chime set. Wide (36–48): cascading harp. Every rope carries a fixed ±6-cent drift, so unison ropes shimmer against each other like real neighbouring tubes rather than stacking sterile.

Key changes (from the scale timeline) and OCT/RNG changes re-voice every hanging rope live — the field re-pitches without missing a swing.

Physics

ROPE STRENGTH: Constraint stiffness. High = rods, clean pendulums. Low = bungees: ropes stretch under heavy orbs, periods wobble, collisions squash. Also lowers the tear threshold.
GRAVITY: The tempo of the world. Low = slow lunar arcs; high = fast, busy swings.
WIND: A gusting horizontal force, phase-offset per rope so the field breathes instead of marching. This is the "keeps playing" control: with wind, neighbouring ropes brush into strums on their own. Wind is also audible — a quiet band of air rises with the gusts. Orbs catch wind by area over mass: small orbs flutter, giants plough.
Gravity wells: Every orb attracts every other (inverse-square, capped). Between normal orbs it's negligible; inflate one and nearby swings bend toward it — orbits tighten, collisions cluster, and the big orb becomes the gravitational (and tonal) centre. Faint hairlines fade in between orbs proportional to the pull.
TICKS: The level of the swing-extreme metronome ticks. Zero for pure interaction-driven sound; low values keep the clockwork as a whisper under the field.
WIND PULSE: Top bar: OFF · BEAT · BAR · 2BAR. A tempo-synced gust shove at every grid line while the transport runs, direction alternating pulse to pulse. It pumps the swings into the groove the way you'd push a playground swing: ropes whose period matches the interval entrain hard, others syncopate against it. Works with WIND at zero (pure rhythmic pumping) or on top of random gusts, and pairs beautifully with QNT. The mote field and the air bed ride each shove, so you see and hear every push.

The Sound Engine

MATERIAL: Equal-power crossfade between two engines: STRING (Karplus-Strong pluck) and CHIME (modal synthesis: four inharmonic bar-mode partials at 1 : 2.76 : 5.40 : 8.93, a few cents of fresh random detune per strike — the true windchime timbre). Mid-values blend both.
DECAY: Full ring down to tight pluck. Scales the string's ring, the chime's T60 (quadratically — the bottom is genuinely percussive), and the sympathetic bed together.
RESONANCE: Sympathetic ropes: when one rope sounds, the other hanging ropes hum along, strongest at unison/octave/fifth. The patch layout is the resonator — a dense pentatonic field turns into a sitar-like halo.
SPACE: Reverb send.
The body: Everything passes through a synthesized chime-tube / vibraphone-resonator impulse response (Pendulum's entry in the family's body-IR theme: Gravity's double bass, Glyph's guitar). Parametric, regenerated per sample rate, no asset.

Transport & Quantize

The physics is deliberately clock-free — wind and gravity set the groove. The transport drives two things.

The scale timeline — segments advance in bars (host transport when hosted; PLAY + BPM chip in Standalone).
Gate quantize (QNT) — with a grid selected (1/32 … 1/4), every sound event is held and fired on the next grid line instead of the instant of collision. Newer events on the same rope replace unfired ones; stopping the transport drops pending events. Free physics + quantized gates = chaotic motion that lands as rhythm.

QNT needs a transport QNT needs a running transport; with it stopped, everything stays free.

The Scale System

Standard Touchmachines model: the segment timeline is the sole source of truth (always on, minimum one segment). 16 scales, per-segment custom key masks (tap chip keys), and 11 tuning systems including Arabic maqam (24-TET), Turkish makam (53-comma), Indian 22-shruti. Under a microtuned system, rope pitches come from the system's degree set and retune at trigger time; the strip and SCALE page light per degree.

A note on drift The ±6-cent rope drift rides on top of microtuning — in dense systems (53-comma) that is a meaningful fraction of a degree, which reads as extra shimmer.

Presets

The preset chip opens the shared folder-tree browser (same as every Touchmachines plugin): tap to load, drag to move into folders, rename/delete per row, + FOLDER / + SAVE. A preset is the complete patch — ropes (with sizes and drift), physics, sound macros, FIELD settings, and the full scale timeline. User presets live in %APPDATA%\Pendulum\Presets\.

Factory presets

Preset	Character
Init	Clean slate
Porch Chimes	Chime material, 12-semitone range, six short tubes, gentle breeze, sympathetic halo
Storm Harp	String material, 48-semitone range, eight ropes with one giant orb, heavy wind, stretchy ropes
Clockwork	Five swing periods of full-level ticks pumped by a BEAT pulse over an Am → Dm → E harmonic-minor timeline — the clock winds down, tenses, resets
Groove Pump	BAR pulse + 1/8 gate quantize with a central gravity well, vamping Dm pent ↔ Cm pent
Gravity Well	One 2.8× orb bending a slow lunar field, thick sympathetic halo, a single unmoving D Phrygian
Music Box	Seven tiny tubes in a 6-semitone window an octave up, 1/16 gate, drifting Am pent ↔ G pent every two bars
Deep Bells	Long heavy chime tubes two octaves down, full ring, 2BAR breathing, a single E minor pentatonic

Pulse presets want a clock The pulse-driven presets (Clockwork, Groove Pump, Music Box, Deep Bells) want a running transport — press PLAY in standalone, or just play your host.

MIDI Out

Tap the PENDULUM title block to open Settings; the MIDI tab holds the routing (the same dialog as the other Touchmachines instruments). Each of the 8 rope colour channels is a track.

Notes: Enable a track and every sound event on that colour sends a note (nominal 12-TET pitch, per-track octave offset, velocity from impact energy) on its MIDI channel, with a note-off after a DECAY-scaled gate. Route All collapses everything onto one shared channel.
CC streams: ("string info") Two independent CC slots per track, each streaming a physics source as a continuous controller on the track's channel: Orb X, Orb Y, Swing Speed, Orb Size, or Wind (global gust). Change-gated so still orbs don't flood the stream. CC works with or without note output — a rope can be a pure modulation source.

MIDI settings are rig state (saved in %APPDATA%\Pendulum\settings.xml), not patch state — your routing survives preset changes. Note that quantized events (QNT) send their MIDI at the quantized moment too, so external synths ride the same grid.

Try it Route channel 1's notes to a synth and its CC slots to filter cutoff (Orb X) and resonance (Swing Speed) — the pendulum literally plays and modulates the patch at once.

Recipes

The porch

MATERIAL 0.9+, RNG 12, DECAY 0.85, RESONANCE 0.5, WIND 25. Hang six short ropes close together. Walk away.

Wind sequencer

DECAY 0.25, QNT 16, PLAY at ~100 BPM, WIND 40. The gusts write a step sequence.

Gravity-well drone

One rope with a 3× orb, three light ropes around it, WIND 30, RESONANCE high. The giant is the tonal anchor; the small ones orbit and strike it.

Range sweep

While anything plays, click RNG from 48 → 24 → 12 → 6. The same physics collapses from harp cascade to two-note gong meditation.

Key journey

Build 2-bar segments in the strip (e.g. Am pent → F maj → G maj), press PLAY, and let the wind play the progression.

Tips & Notes

The physics keeps running with the editor closed — a windy patch keeps playing in your session.
Everything is saved in host state: reopen a session and the hanging garden returns (ropes restore at rest; the wind re-energizes them).
Torn ropes are gone — tearing is removal, not mute. There is no per-rope mute yet; tear selectively, or save the patch as a preset before pruning.
Strums need real orb speed — a barely-swinging orb brushing a rope stays silent by design (threshold keeps the field from chattering).
Max 12 ropes; colour channels repeat after 8.