Solelh Liminalizer

A hallway at 3am. A shopping mall after closing. The feeling something just left, or is about to arrive.

Liminalizer is not a general-purpose effects suite. It was built for one thing. Making sound feel like it exists somewhere that shouldn't exist. Ambient, liminal, dreamcore, hauntology, hypnagogic. If you make music at 2am that sounds like a Windows 98 screensaver running in an empty gymnasium, this was made for you.

Pitch Drift pulls the pitch in slow, unpredictable directions using a smoothed random LFO that never settles into a pattern. That's exactly what makes something feel slightly wrong in the right way.

Unison runs up to 6 detuned voices through per-voice circular delay buffers. One sound becomes something that feels like it's coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

Low Pass Filter is a biquad LPF with resonance and an LFO directly on the cutoff. That slow, breathing filter movement that makes a pad feel alive and decaying at the same time.

Bandwidth EQ combines a high-pass and a low shelf to carve the frequency edges of a sound into something that feels like it's being heard through a wall or down a corridor.

Formant Shift runs three cascaded bandpass filters tuned to vowel formants with LFO modulation on their centers. This is how you make a synth pad start to sound like it is trying to speak.

Tape Saturation is soft clipping with high-frequency rolloff. Three modes: cassette, tube, reel. This is the module that adds age to a sound.

Wow & Flutter has independent rate and depth for both components, with a randomization parameter on the flutter so it never repeats itself. This is what makes something sound like it was recorded on equipment that was already dying.

Chorus runs two modulated delay lines with stereo spread and feedback. That wet, slowly moving thickness that is everywhere in 80s and 90s ambient recordings.

Phaser goes up to 12 all-pass filter stages with LFO sweep. Slow, sweeping movement that sits underneath everything without calling attention to itself.

Tremolo offers sine, triangle, or soft square amplitude modulation with a stereo mode that offsets the LFO phase between channels. A subtle panning motion that feels like breathing.

Ring Modulator multiplies a carrier oscillator, sine or triangle, into your signal. For that metallic, dissonant undertone that makes a sound feel slightly inhuman.

Delay is a stereo delay with a biquad LPF on the feedback path and a diffusion parameter that blurs the repeats into each other.

Reverb uses a Freeverb-style architecture with 8 comb filters and 4 all-pass filters, prime-tuned buffer lengths for stereo spread, pre-delay up to 200ms, and a modulation layer on the comb filter feedback. This is the module that builds the room.

Shimmer is a pitch-shifted reverb tail via overlap-add on a 4096-sample circular buffer. This is what makes a note turn into a cathedral.

There is also a global master wet control and an output level in dB. The UI background reacts to the output RMS in real time at 24fps because it felt right.

Written from scratch in C++ with JUCE. No DSP libraries, no borrowed code. Biquad coefficients computed inline, all delay lines pre-allocated with no audio-thread allocation, parameter smoothing in the processing loop. Stable at standard block sizes with a 4 second declared tail length.

Right now the installer is a Windows-only .exe, compiled and packaged via a Python build script. The raw .vst3 file itself should theoretically load on Mac since the underlying C++ code is platform-agnostic, but I have not been able to test and validate a proper Mac build yet so I cannot guarantee it. Linux is not packaged at all for now. I am actively working on all of this. Proper Mac and Linux support, a cleaner installer, and a lot of updates are coming. This is version one. There is more.

It is completely free. If what you make with it ends up meaning something to you, you can pay what you want at checkout. There is no pressure and no minimum. It just helps more things like this get made.

Make something that feels like a place no one can find on a map.