Work

Tonik

A powerful instrument plugin with intuitive controls. Waveforms you pick by shape, envelopes you drag, and three sound engines.

Client
Stems Labs
Role
Design and engineering
Year
2026
The Tonik plugin window in sampler mode: the preset "SMP: Stereo Grand" in the navigator, the eyebrow PIANO above the title Stereo Grand, a large blue spectrum curve filling the window, Volume and Reverb knobs top right, and a full-width piano keyboard

The premise

Tonik is the instrument inside Flowtonik, the plugin that loads when you put an instrument on a MIDI track. It is three instruments rather than one: a sampler, a subtractive synth and a drum kit, marked SMP, SYN and DRM in the preset name.

Soft synths traditionally greet you with every parameter at once, on the theory that visible depth signals capability. For someone who can hear the sound they want but couldn’t name a filter envelope, that panel is a wall.

One window, three depths

Two rails never move. The preset navigator runs across the top and a C2–C8 keyboard along the bottom, in every mode; everything between them changes with what you load. And each instrument gets only the surface its job needs. A loaded piano is already the sound, so the sampler above gets two knobs, how loud and how wet. The synth gets five tabs and roughly thirty parameters. The drum kit gets sixteen named pads with three knobs for the selected one.

The MOD tab: an amp envelope drawn as a filled blue shape with A, D, S and R knobs beside it, two LFO sections with shape and destination dropdowns and Rate and Depth knobs, and a glide section with a Time knob and a Legato checkbox
The synth end of the spectrum. One of five tabs, and still a small enough set of decisions to reason about.
Tonik in drum mode: a four-by-four grid of labelled pads from KICK to FX2 with KICK selected in blue, and a Pad 1 panel on the right showing the selected pad's waveform with Vol, Pan and Pitch knobs
Pads are named for what they are, and the selected pad opens into three controls rather than a channel strip of its own.

A synth you can read

The synth opens on MAIN, a live spectrum of the sound you’re playing. The four tabs after it run in signal order, OSC, FILTER, MOD, FX: the path the sound actually takes. Splitting one dense panel apart costs a click, and the tab bar itself teaches the architecture of a synth to someone who didn’t know it had one.

The OSC tab: two oscillator rows, each with five waveform buttons drawn as the waveform itself (SIN, TRI, SAW, SQR, WT), the selected one outlined in blue, with Level, Mix and Detune knobs, wavetable pickers and Pos knobs; below them Sub and Noise levels, a mix dropdown and a Unison row of Voices, Detune and Spread
The waveform buttons are drawn as their own waveforms. A sine is a sine.

The controls are pictures of what they do. Waveform buttons are drawn as the waveforms themselves, legible without ever having read the word sawtooth. Envelopes are drawn as filled shapes with the four ADSR knobs beside them, the same graph-and-numbers pairing as Flowtonik’s plugins: the shape shows the relationship at a glance, the knobs give each value a precise grab. Each LFO reads as a sentence: a sine wave, moving the filter, this fast, this much.

The effects rack is deliberately not a rack: chorus, delay, reverb, fixed, with no slots, no ordering and no fourth. Each is a checkbox and three knobs, and the third is always Mix, so the last question is the same question every time and the answer transfers.

The preset is the front door

The patch name is the largest thing on screen, with prev and next beside it: arrow, arrow, arrow while the keyboard stays under your hands. Open the browser and all three instruments sit in one menu, Synth, Drums and Sampler, each with its own categories.

The preset browser open over the MAIN tab: three columns headed Synth, Drums and Sampler, each listing sound categories with submenu arrows, with Fx ticked under Synth
One browser for all three instruments. Picking a sound and picking an instrument are the same act.

The mode prefix travels with the preset, so stepping through the navigator moves you from a piano to a laser lead to a drum kit without ever choosing an instrument type as a separate act. The mode is a property of the sound, and the sound is what you came for.

Technology

  • C++ and JUCE, built with CMake, shipped as AU, VST3 and Standalone from one codebase
  • Python for preset generation, so the factory library is produced rather than hand-authored
  • The same build loads inside Flowtonik and in any other host, so this is the whole product, not a cut-down in-house version