Interface
We’ve been fans since the quirky, pizza-inspired Beat Scholar first landed in 2022. Just over a year later, and Modalics’ product stable has ballooned with further excellence. The two co-founders explain their story…
cm: Hi guys, let’s start with your latest release, Time Oddity Chorus. Can you talk us through what your new chorus plugin brings to the table?
Or: “Basically, it didn’t start as a chorus plugin, it started as a segment within another plugin. We developed EON-Arp which is an arpeggiator. It had a mini-synth with a fairly simple delay module. Eyal programmed this cool filter delay and we loved it. When we started getting into processing plugins, we wondered what we had already made that we like and could expand on. We ended up tweaking that delay so much and adding a bunch of features that it became this sort of modulation engine that can produce all kinds of different effects. We immediately were drawn to the whole chorus and phaser area. It’s a very gratifying and distinct effect. We identified that we had got somewhere cool, then Eyal added the LFO aspect. It sort of built itself because we were excited about the project and understood that this would be a very cool first release for this engine.
“We feel like we’ve managed to make something that’s pretty distinct in the character and voicing of the plugin. But also, I felt that most [chorus] plugins fall into the category of something that either models a specific device (like a Juno chorus, for example) or they’re modulation-station, feature-packed products. We fell into a spot in the middle. Our interface is very friendly, it feels like a pedal or a device, but the engine itself is pretty robust, and you can create a lot of variation in it.”
cm:How long did the development process take, and was that a usual route?
Eyal: “A lot of things that happen with us happen along the way. We develop things in a very fluid state. When we were developing MINDst Drums – one of our biggest releases to date – it had so many different effects in it, and we needed to build each one in turn. Every time we do that we think, ‘oh, this sounds good’ – we’ll then come back and develop it further. I would throw away more complex parameters once we hit on areas that just sounded good to our ears. We do this all the time at Modalics. But, with Time Oddity Chorus as a final product, the actual development time was around two weeks – because that engine foundation had been gradually worked on. It was very quick. We did a lot of work on the UI and the presentation, but the engine and infrastructure was already built. We could move very quickly.”
Or: “We actually formed Modalics because we like to work at speed; our development cycles are very intense. While E
