Time Terrarium: Four Kinds of Echo in One Glass
Time Terrarium is a delay with four habitats: eight species of echo, including tape, ping-pong, shimmer and reverse, an orb that moves sound between them, orbits, migration, Seal and 30 presets. What it does and how it sounds.
A delay usually gives you one kind of echo. Tape, ping-pong, shimmer, reverse: you pick one, set the time and the feedback, and if you want another kind you load another plug-in.
Time Terrarium puts four of them in the same glass, one in each corner, and adds a glowing orb that decides which of them your sound lands in. Leave the orb in a corner and it is a tape delay. Put it between Moss and Water and every repeat is half tape, half ping-pong. Set it orbiting and the kind of echo changes as the bar goes by.
Key takeaways
- Four habitats, each planted with one of eight species of echo: Moss (tape), Water (ping-pong), Crystal (shimmer), Ash (reverse), Frost, Dust, Pebble and Wind. Each has one Character control.
- The orb places new sound between them. Four orbit shapes move it over half a bar to sixteen bars, locked to your host’s bar position.
- Migrate passes each repeat on to the next habitat. Seal closes the lid and keeps what is inside circulating.
- 30 presets in six groups, and Roll for a random new starting point.
- €19. VST3 and AU on macOS, VST3 on Windows, VST3 and LV2 on Linux.
- This is 0.9.0-rc1, a release candidate.
The habitats
The glass has four corners, and each one holds a species. The default planting is Moss, Water, Crystal and Ash: tape, ping-pong, shimmer and reverse. Four more are one click away: Frost, where the first echo stays clear and later ones blur into a wash; Dust, which scatters grains in time and across the stereo field; Pebble, bouncing taps that fall left and right like a stone skipping to rest; and Wind, a filter sweeping through the repeats.
Winter Garden: Frost, Crystal, Moss and Wind, with Migrate turned clockwise.
Every species has one Character control, and it does one thing. Moss’s Age adds wow, flutter and saturation and darkens the repeats. Crystal’s Interval picks an octave up, a fifth up, an octave and a fifth up, or an octave down. Ash’s Grain chops the reversed fragments shorter until they stutter. Click a habitat’s name to plant something else there, or drag it onto another corner to swap the two.
Echoes that move
Three controls make the repeats travel.
The orb and its orbits. Drag the orb and new sound lands where it is. Orbit moves it for you in a Circle, a Figure 8, a Pendulum or a Drift, over anything from half a bar to sixteen bars. Four Seasons takes the orb round all four habitats in four bars, so a sustained part cycles through tape, ping-pong, shimmer and reverse without you touching anything.
Migrate. Turned right, each repeat moves on to the next habitat clockwise; turned left, the other way. One note comes back as tape, then ping-pong, then shimmer, then reverse. That is the Migration preset.
Pattern. Each habitat can run at its own multiple of the echo time: Dotted, Triplet, a falling Cascade, or Golden, spaced by the golden ratio so the four rhythms drift against each other and never quite line up. Wandering Tide uses Golden with Migrate turned the other way.
Dotted Canopy. The lanes under the glass show where the repeats of a single note will fall, before you play one.
Seal
Seal closes the lid. Nothing new gets in, and the echoes already inside keep circulating and migrating at a steady level until you open it again. Feedback has no effect while it is closed. It turns the last bar of a phrase into a held texture you can play over, and Sealed Jar is set up to be sealed.
How it sounds
The product page has three sets of dry/wet comparisons, all level-matched to the dry signal:
- One phrase, four habitats. The same phrase through Moss, Water, Crystal and Ash in turn.
- Ecosystems. The same phrase with the echoes on the move: Four Seasons, Winter Garden and Wandering Tide.
- Drums. Four bars at 100 BPM through Skipping Stones, Dotted Canopy, Gale and Sandglass.
30 presets, and a die
Six groups: Essentials for everyday delays, Rhythmic, Ambient, Ecosystems for the moving ones, Character, and Wilds, which plant the other four species. Each preset has a line about what it does. Roll throws a new random starting point (orb, orbit, time, habitats, pattern and space) and leaves your Mix and Output where they were.
Where it runs
- Windows (64-bit): VST3
- macOS 11 and later, Intel and Apple Silicon: VST3 and AU, as a signed and notarised installer
- Linux (x64): VST3 and LV2
This is 0.9.0-rc1. It is a release candidate: complete, but still waiting on the last reports. If something misbehaves in your DAW, write to hi.23dsp@gmail.com with your OS and your DAW.