How to Use Time Terrarium: Habitats, the Orb, Migrate and Seal
How Time Terrarium works — planting species in the four habitats, placing and orbiting the orb, Migrate, Pattern, Seal, the Space controls and Roll — and which presets to start from.
Most delays give you one kind of echo and a set of knobs to adjust it. Time Terrarium has four, one in each corner of a glass, and a glowing orb that decides which of them your sound lands in. Leave the orb in a corner and you have a tape delay, or a ping-pong, or a shimmer. Put it between two and you hear both. Set it orbiting, or let the repeats migrate from one corner to the next, and the same phrase comes back as a different kind of echo on every pass.
Eight species
Each corner holds one species, and each species has one Character control.
| Species | What it is | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Moss | tape | Age — more wow, flutter and saturation, and darker repeats |
| Water | ping-pong | Current — how strongly the repeats swirl and smear |
| Crystal | shimmer | Interval — octave up, fifth up, octave and a fifth up, or octave down |
| Ash | reverse | Grain — shortens the reversed fragments into quicker, stuttering sparks |
| Frost | melting | Melt — the first echo stays clear, later ones blur into a softer wash |
| Dust | grains | Scatter — how far the grains spread in time and across the stereo field |
| Pebble | bouncing | Bounce — from an even roll to a stone skipping to rest |
| Wind | gusts | Gust — how far and how fast a filter sweeps through the repeats |
Click a habitat’s name to plant a different species there, or drag it onto another corner to swap the two. The default is Moss, Water, Crystal and Ash; the Wilds presets plant the other four.
The orb, and orbits
Drag the orb to choose where new sound lands. Orbit moves it for you: Circle, Figure 8, Pendulum or Drift, taking anything from half a bar to sixteen bars, with Depth for how far it travels from where you placed it. With Sync on and the host playing, the orbit follows the host’s bar position, so every cycle starts in time with the song.
Migrate and Pattern
Migrate sends each repeat on to the neighbouring habitat: clockwise from top left, or the other way round when turned left. With Moss, Water, Crystal and Ash in the corners, one note comes back as tape, then ping-pong, then shimmer, then reverse.
Pattern gives each habitat its own multiple of the echo time: Unison, Dotted, Triplet, Cascade, or Golden, spaced by the golden ratio so the four rhythms never quite line up.
Seal
Press Seal and the lid closes. Nothing new gets in, and the echoes already inside keep circulating and migrating at a steady level until you open it again. Play over it, or automate it at the end of a phrase and let the last notes hang. Sealed Jar is set up for exactly that.
Space
Bloom sends the echoes, and a little of the dry signal, into a reverb that grows larger and longer as you turn it up. Duck lowers the echoes while you play and lets them swell back in the gaps. Width runs from mono to 200%, and Low Cut and High Cut trim the echoes and the bloom without touching the dry signal.
Under the glass, one lane per habitat shows the repeats a single note would make with the current settings — loudest as the biggest dots — so you can see a pattern before you play into it.
30 presets, and Roll
Six groups: Essentials, Rhythmic, Ambient, Ecosystems, Character and Wilds, each preset with a line about what it does. When you want somewhere new to start, Roll throws a fresh patch — orb, orbit, time, habitats, pattern and space — and leaves your Mix and Output alone.
Screenshots
Winter Garden. Frost, Crystal, Moss and Wind in the four corners, and Migrate turned clockwise so each repeat moves on to the next habitat. Four Seasons. The orb circles all four habitats once every four bars, locked to the host's bar position. Dotted Canopy. Each habitat runs at its own multiple of the echo time, and the lanes underneath show where the repeats of a single note will fall. Glass Cathedral. Crystal's shimmer an octave up, flooding a large bloom. The default, Terrarium. One tape echo, lightly bloomed, with three more habitats waiting in the other corners.
Hear it
One phrase, four habitatsThe same phrase, with the orb moved to a different corner each time. Level-matched to the dry signal, so what changes is the kind of echo. 0:00–:––Ecosystems — echoes on the moveThe same phrase again, with the repeats travelling. The orb circling the glass, repeats migrating from one species to the next, and four habitats on golden-ratio times drifting against each other. 0:00–:––Drums — rhythm and grainFour bars of drums at 100 BPM. Pebble's bouncing taps, dotted cross-rhythms from four habitats at once, Wind's swept gusts, and Dust's grains scattering in triplets over reverse swells. 0:00–:––
Release notes
0.9.0-rc1
- First public release.
- Four habitats, each planted with one of eight species of echo — Moss, Water, Crystal, Ash, Frost, Dust, Pebble and Wind — with one Character control each.
- The orb places new sound between the habitats; four orbit shapes move it, from half a bar to sixteen bars, locked to the host's bar position.
- Migrate passes repeats from habitat to habitat, clockwise or counter-clockwise, and five patterns give each habitat its own echo time.
- Seal closes the lid and keeps the echoes inside circulating at a steady level.
- Lanes under the glass show the repeats a single note would make with the current settings.
- 30 presets in six groups, plus Roll for a new random starting point.
- Signed and notarised macOS installer; VST3 and AU on macOS, VST3 on Windows, VST3 and LV2 on Linux.
From the Journal
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.
