The Master band

The Master band is Aconite’s output stage: Gain, Clip, and the master brickwall Limiter, the oversampling Quality and Auto-HQ settings, the bus saturation Glue and Warmth, the power-supply Sag (with Depth and Time), and the master meter with its sag indicator. This is where the whole mix is glued, warmed, and level-managed before it leaves the synth.

Everything here sits downstream of every voice and every effect in the rack. The signal has already passed through the oscillators, filter, waveshaper, and FX bus by the time it reaches the Master band, so changes here colour the full, finished mix.

Gain, Clip, and Limiter

Gain is the output level knob. Use it to trim Aconite’s output into your mix or interface. It sits before the Clip and Limiter stages.

Clip is the output safety clipper, a character stage with three settings. Off is bit-exact and can overshoot; Soft rounds peaks gently; Hard brick-wall clips to stop overs reaching the host. If you are deliberately running the output hot into the Glue or your own hardware, you may want to trim Gain first.

Limiter is a true master brickwall limiter, and it sits last in the master chain, after the Clip stage and everything else, so it is the final ceiling on the output no matter what precedes it. It is off by default and bit-exact when off. Turned on it is zero-latency and stereo-linked: the gain needed to hold this sample under the ceiling is applied to this sample, so the output can never exceed the ceiling and there is no lookahead delay. A Ceiling control sets that level (-3 to 0 dBFS, default -1 dBFS) and a Release control (30 to 500 ms, default 100 ms) sets how quickly the gain glides back up between peaks, long enough not to pump on bass. Because it can never let the output clip, it is a safe thing to leave on when you want to push the Glue, Sag, and Drive hard, or when you are demoing a patch and do not want a stray peak to spoil it.

Quality and Auto-HQ

Quality sets how hard Aconite works to keep the audio clean. Because analog modelling, especially heavily driven or resonant filters, generates harmonics well above the audible range, the synth can oversample internally so those harmonics are formed and then cleanly filtered away before they reach your ears. That takes CPU. Quality gives you the choice:

• 1× (Draft): the lightest setting. No oversampling; a clean, direct path for when you are writing or arranging and CPU headroom matters more than fidelity.
• 2× (Live): the default. A good balance for playing and auditioning patches.
• 4× (High): cleaner transients and high-frequency detail. Reach for this on exposed, resonant, or heavily driven leads.
• 8× (Offline): maximum fidelity, for final renders.

Only the audio processing pays the oversampling cost. Your modulation, envelopes, and parameter automation always run at full host rate regardless of this setting.

Auto-HQ on bounce is in the Options menu. It is off by default, and the tradeoff is deliberate:

• Off: an offline render (bounce, export, or mixdown) uses whatever Quality you were monitoring at. Your exported audio is a faithful capture of exactly what you heard while the patch was playing. No surprises.
• On: an offline render always uses maximum oversampling regardless of your live Quality setting. Monitor at 2× to keep CPU comfortable; your exported file comes out as clean as 8× can make it. The flip side is that the bounce may differ subtly in the high frequencies from what you heard while playing.

Choose On when pristine renders matter more than render-matches-monitor consistency; leave it Off (the default) when you want the export to be exactly the sound you approved at your monitoring setting.

1× (Draft) is a true passthrough; there is no oversampling or resampling overhead at all. It is the fastest possible path, useful when you are sketching ideas on a light machine or tracking CPU usage in a dense session.

Glue and Warmth

Glue is a gentle analog-style bus saturation that works on the full summed output. The effect is subtle by design: it adds very low-order harmonics that give all your voices a shared “fingerprint,” so they feel like they are coming from the same instrument rather than a stack of separate sounds. Push it up and you hear soft compression and warmth beginning to develop as loud passages grow fuller.

Warmth shapes the character of that saturation. Turned toward one end it leans into odd-order harmonics (a harder, more aggressive edge); toward the other it shifts to even-order harmonics (a softer, rounder colour, closer to the way a transformer or tube output stage colours a mix bus).

Glue and Warmth are at zero by default; the path is bit-exact clean until you turn them up. Start with Glue at a very small amount and listen to a wide chord: the voices should lock together a little more. Large values are available but are more of a creative effect than a mixing tool.

When to reach for Glue: use it when a patch with many voices feels slightly diffuse or when you want the output to feel like it is passing through a console summing bus. It is not a replacement for the FX-rack effects (Tape, Distortion, and Compressor each have their own richer character), but it acts on the whole mix at once in a way the per-effect inserts do not.

PSU Sag

Sag emulates the power-supply droop that happens in real polysynths when many loud voices draw current at once. The shared power rails sag slightly under load, and the whole output ducks a little, then blooms back as the sound decays and the supply recovers. On hardware instruments like the Juno and Jupiter series, this is a core part of why they feel alive under your hands: a big chord compresses and breathes differently than a single note.

Three controls shape the effect:

• Sag (Amount): how much the output ducks under load. A small amount adds a very natural “give” to chords; larger values become an obvious pumping or breathing effect.
• Depth: how deep the sag reaches into the signal. Combined with Amount, this lets you set a gentle squash that barely touches soft passages or a more dramatic pull that hits hard.
• Time: how slowly the output recovers after the peak load. A short Time means the bloom is quick and tight; a long Time gives a slower, more languid swell back to full level as a chord decays. The sag droop indicator on the master meter shows the current rail gain in real time so you can see the effect rather than just listen for it.

Like Glue, Sag defaults to zero. Even a very small amount of Sag on a pad or chord patch can make the difference between a sound that feels digital-static and one that breathes the way a hardware instrument does. It works best on polyphonic patches where several voices sum at once; on a monophonic line the effect is minimal, because the load does not change as much from note to note.

The master meter

The wide meter in the Master band shows the peak output level for left and right channels, with a dedicated sag droop indicator that animates the current power-supply rail gain when Sag is engaged. Use the meter to watch for clipping (trim Gain down until peaks stay comfortable), and watch the sag indicator to tune the Sag Time and Depth by eye as well as by ear.