A drone, texture and sound-design engine. One continuous voice in FREE, or polyphonic from MIDI. Nine different machines under your hands, with two reverb spaces built in.
This page is the manual. It is kept up to date here, so there is nothing to re-download when something changes. Last updated 4 September 2026.
It is an instrument, not an effect
VRESK makes its own sound. It goes on an instrument track, a software-instrument track or a synth track, whatever your host calls it. It does not go on an insert of a plain audio track.
The one that catches everyone first. On an audio track VRESK's own meters move, but you hear nothing, because an audio track only passes audio that was recorded onto it or fed into its input. Put VRESK on an instrument track and it comes through.
The fastest way to hear it
If it is still silent, the Every control tab has a short "I hear nothing" checklist near the top.
FREE and MIDI, the two ways it plays
The shape of the panel
The big knob in the middle is ROOT, the pitch, because it does most of the work. The twelve smaller knobs orbit it, coloured by what they touch: orange is the generator, blue is the space, sand is the output. The legend sits under the small meters on the left. The nine-cell grid top-left picks the engine.
The one line to keep reading
Under the algorithm grid there is a short line of text. It names the engine you are on and, more usefully, tells you what FOLD does in that engine. Every knob on VRESK changes meaning depending on the algorithm, so that line is the quickest way to know what the hands are doing.
I hear nothing
Work down this list. It is nearly always one of the first three.
The two small bars under the SOUND switch are VRESK's own output meters. If they are moving, the plug-in is making sound and the problem is somewhere in your host's routing, not in VRESK.
The algorithm grid and the two menus
The 3 by 3 grid of cells. Click one to choose the engine. Rows are families, columns are characters inside the family. The The nine algorithms tab describes all nine.
The reverb and delay at the end of the chain. IRON is a metallic, multi-tap comb: hard, resonant, more like a room made of pipes. VEIL is a diffuse cloud: soft, smeared, more like air. Same knobs feed both.
FREE drones by itself. MIDI waits for a note, which switches the voice on and sets its pitch. See the Getting started tab.
Turns the sound on and off. It fades over about thirty milliseconds so it never clicks, and the reverb tail keeps running underneath, so switching back on picks up where it left off. It is a performance switch and is deliberately not saved into presets, so browsing presets while muted never un-mutes you.
The preset menu with a back and forward arrow either side. Twenty-one starting points. Pick a name from the menu, or step through them with the arrows.
The generator knobs (orange)
The pitch of the whole voice, from a sub 16 Hz rumble to 2 kHz. It is skewed so the useful drone octaves take up most of the knob. In MIDI mode a held note overrides it.
Detune, stereo width and, in the cluster engines, how far the partials are spaced apart. Low is narrow and unison, high is wide and beating.
The character knob, and the one that changes most between engines. It sits at centre for neutral and goes two ways. Turned one way and the other it does different things in each algorithm, from ring modulation to wavefolding to bit-crushing. Read the line under the grid for what it is doing right now.
The primary wave or table scan. Roughly, it moves the tone from rounder to brighter, or scans a window across the partials in the cluster engines.
A secondary colour: the second oscillator's tone, the modulator colour, or a slow tremor in the noise engine. Small moves, big changes.
A seed, not a level. Each value 0 to 31 reshuffles the tuning, the reverb tap spacing and the resonator layout to a fixed, repeatable variant. Turn it to audition different "builds" of the same patch. The same number always gives the same result, so it recalls with a preset.
The space knobs (blue)
A single tone tilt. Centre is flat. Turn it down toward low-pass to take the top off, up toward high-pass to thin it out. It sits before the reverb, so it shapes what goes into the space.
How much of the IRON or VEIL structure you hear. It is a blend, not a send, so the structure keeps running even at zero and the tail never cuts off when you turn it down mid-note.
How long the space rings on. Low is a short slap, high is a long hold.
How fast the high frequencies fade inside the space. Low keeps it bright and metallic, high makes it dark and woolly.
The output knobs (sand)
Saturation on the way out. Low is clean, high pushes into a soft clip that thickens and dirties the whole voice.
Runs external audio through VRESK's own chain, tilt, drive and space. It sets how much of the side input comes through. It is greyed out in Pro Tools, which has no way to feed a side input to an instrument like this.
The output volume. The two small bars on the left show the level leaving the plug-in.
How the grid is laid out
Three families down, three characters across. The knobs stay the same, but each engine reads them differently, which is the whole idea: one set of hands, nine machines. FOLD is the knob that varies most, so each engine below says what FOLD does in it.
PAIR — two oscillators (top row)
Two oscillators. FOLD sweeps exponential cross-modulation into ring modulation. SHAPE scans the carrier from saw to pulse. Metallic bells and clangs at the extremes.
An oscillator pair through a sine wavefolder. FOLD is the fold depth and feedback. It gets loud fast, so ride LEVEL as you open it.
Two-operator phase modulation with operator feedback, the classic hard, glassy engine. FOLD is the modulation index.
BANK — four wavetable voices (middle row)
Four wavetable voices. SHAPE scans the table. FOLD crushes the bit depth one way and cross-modulates the frequency the other way.
Four detuned voices stacked in unison. SPREAD is the detune. FOLD sweeps phase modulation into FM. Thick and chorused.
Four voices into sample-rate and bit decimation. FOLD in either direction destroys it further. Dirty and digital.
CLUSTER — eight partials (bottom row)
Eight sine partials with phase feedback. SPREAD spaces them out, SHAPE scans a window across the bank. Free spacing, so it beats rather than harmonises.
The same eight partials, quantised to a major scale, so the cluster is always a chord. SPREAD opens the voicing.
Noise-excited modal resonators, for metallic hits and rattles. FOLD raises the Q, from a dry knock at one end to a long metallic ring at the other. SHAPE opens the excitation from a thin hiss to a full rush.
The trick that ties it together: CAST reseeds every tuning, tap spacing and resonator, so the same algorithm with the same knobs gives a whole family of different results as you turn CAST. Find a patch you like, then sweep CAST to find its variants.
It is silent and asking for a key
That is normal. VRESK stays silent until it is unlocked. On the first screen, paste the key from your Gumroad receipt and press UNLOCK VRESK.
Where is my licence key?
In your Gumroad receipt email, and on your Gumroad library page. VRESK is sold on its own, so it has one key.
Do I have to activate every format separately?
No. One activation covers the Audio Unit, the VST3 and the AAX on that machine.
Does it phone home? Do I need to stay online?
No, and no. It checks the licence once, when you first activate. After that the activation is written to a file on your own machine and it never contacts a server again. You can take the machine permanently offline and it keeps working.
On macOS the record lives at ~/Library/Tunary Instruments/VRESK/license.json. The
installer never touches that file, so updating never costs you your activation.
My key was rejected
Send me the key you are using and the email address you bought with, and I will sort it at my end. james@tunary.io
The easy way
Download the installer from your Gumroad library and double-click it. It puts the Audio Unit, the VST3 and the AAX where every host looks for them, and you can untick any format on the Installation Type screen. macOS will ask for your password, which is normal for the shared Plug-Ins folder.
To choose formats, click "Customize" on the install screen. The picker hides behind that button and is easy to walk past.
Installing by hand
Use the folders at the top level of your disk, not the ones inside your home folder. In Finder press Shift Cmd G, paste the path, and drag the file in.
Tunary /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components//Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3//Library/Application Support/Avid/Audio/Plug-Ins/The one that catches people. There is a similar folder inside your home folder that starts
with ~. Logic reads both, but some hosts only read the top-level one, so a plug-in put
in the home-folder version can simply never appear. When in doubt, use the top-level folders above.
There is no standalone app
VRESK is a plug-in only, in three formats: Audio Unit, VST3 and AAX. It runs inside a host. The AAX for Pro Tools is Mac only, and it comes in the Mac installer rather than the zip, because it has to go into a folder the zip cannot write to.
Quit your host first
Fully quit your DAW with Cmd Q before installing, then reopen it. Hosts only look for new plug-ins when they start.
What it runs on
macOS 11 Big Sur and later, Universal, so native on both Apple Silicon and Intel. Signed and Apple notarised, so macOS opens it with no security warning.
Where does it show up in my DAW?
Under Tunary Instruments, not under the product name.
Not there at all in Logic? Logic Pro > Settings > Plug-in Manager, search for it. If it is unticked, tick it. If it failed validation, select it and click Reset & Rescan Selection. Usually it just means Logic was open while you installed.
Pro Tools
VRESK is an instrument, so make a new Instrument track and add VRESK on its insert, under Tunary Instruments. It is not for an audio track. In FREE mode it drones with no MIDI needed. Pro Tools has no computer-keyboard playing like Logic's, so to play it by notes use a MIDI keyboard or draw notes on the track.
Not there in Pro Tools? It only scans plug-ins when it launches, so quit it fully with Cmd Q and reopen. That is nearly always it.