Temperamento has announced its Mesa Wavetable Visual Engine iOS/Mac app is due to launch. In something rather switching around the process of wavetable synthesis, Mesa turns visuals into wavetables and then displays the sound in real time.
Unlike in traditional wavetable synths, which take a number of waveforms and then morph between them, Mesa uses Metal shader files to generate the waveform.
A shader file is a text-based computer program which runs directly on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) chip and tells the hardware how to render visual elements, lighting and colouration of each pixel.
Mesa reads each frame’s luminance as a single-cycle waveform, then band-limits it into an alias-free wavetable.
Not only that, but modifiers can be applied — such as filmLook, bloom, rgbSplit, datamosh and mask — with different effects changing the sound.
I’ll be honest, it takes a bit of getting my head around this. The manual describes the process thus:
- MESA renders the shader offscreen, 64 times, sweeping the
timeuniform across the frames of a wavetable. - For each frame it reads one horizontal scanline of pixels and turns each pixel’s luminance into one audio sample.
- Each frame is band-limited (FFT mip-banked) so the result is alias-free across the whole keyboard range.
- The 64 resulting frames become a morphable wavetable — the Morph knob scans across them.
Colour isn’t just pretty – Mesa reads the picture’s luminance as the waveform, so if you change the palette, you change the sound.
“Mesa listens to light and motion. The Vision panel hands you the dials — pick the scanline, weight the colour channels, bend the brightness curve, choose how time crawls across the frames. One shader, a thousand readings.”
Features
This is very much a full instrument/plugin. Features include:
FILTER · ZDF
Zero-delay SVF: Per-voice state-variable filter with Cutoff, Resonance and Drive. Clean, analog-flavoured, self-oscillating.
MOD MATRIX
Morph is first-class: Two LFOs, velocity and mod-wheel routed through a typed matrix — wavetable morph is a primary target. Plus a free-assign slot: pick any source and route it to morph, cutoff, resonance, level or pitch.
FX CHAIN
Eight stages, in series: A full post-mix rack: tape ? flutter ? waveshaper ? chorus ? delay ? reverb ? lo-fi ? tape-stop. Allocation- and lock-free on the audio thread.
UNISON
Stacked & detuned: An oscillator stack with unison voicing and detune, morphing across the frame axis for wide, moving timbres.
ENVELOPE · PITCH
Shape every note: A full ADSR amp envelope, portamento glide between notes, and a pitch envelope that drops or rises into each hit — punchy plucks, sliding leads, percussive stabs.
PRESETS
Browse by category: A packed factory bank sorted into collapsible folders — pads, bass, leads, plucks & bells, keys, drones, FX textures. Save your own into any category, search across the lot.
ALIAS-FREE
FFT mip banks: Every frame is FFT’d at build time into a mip bank; playback picks the mip that keeps the top harmonic under Nyquist.
TAPE FX
Run it to tape: Saturation with HF roll-off, wow & flutter pitch drift, and bit-crushing lo-fi — plus a one-shot tape-stop that decelerates the whole mix to a halt. MIDI-learnable.
SAMPLER
Play your own audio: A sampler voice mode: import any audio, Mesa auto-detects the fundamental and pitch-tracks it across the keys — hot-swapped on the audio thread, just like a wavetable.
LAYER A·B + ARP
Two engines, blended: Layer two patches and blend them to taste, with a built-in arpeggiator to set the whole thing in motion.
MIDI LEARN
Map anything: Right-click any knob, chip or button to bind a CC — every parameter, the mod matrix, tape-stop and all five Vision dials included. Bindings persist across sessions.
ABLETON LINK
In time, on the network: Tempo and phase lock with any Link-enabled app or hardware on the same Wi-Fi — built on the official LinkKit, App-Store-safe.
VFX CHAIN
Stack effects. Hear the difference: Build a chain of visual modifiers — wave warp, edge detect, perspective, affine, blur and more — with per-effect wet/dry and parameter sliders. Each effect bakes into the wavetable. Active effects show as chips live on the waveform display.
MODIFIER NODES
Effects that reshape the sound: filmLook, bloom, rgbSplit, datamosh and mask travel straight from the VKO1 graph into the wavetable — the look and the timbre move together.
Specifications
- FORMATS: AUv3 plug-in + Standalone app
- PLATFORMS: iOS · macOS (Mac Catalyst, Optimized for Mac)
- ENGINE: Native C++17 DSP
- WAVETABLES: 64-frame · FFT mip-banked · alias-free
- VISUAL IMPORT: .vkograph · VKO1 Metal shaders · full modifier graph · 33 palettes
- VISION CONTROL: Sscan row · channel weight · 6 transfer curves · 6 time maps · energy sweep
- SAMPLE IMPORT: Mono PCM · auto pitch-detect · RT-safe hot-swap
- ENVELOPE: Full ADSR · portamento glide · pitch envelope
- MODULATION: 2 LFOs · velocity · mod-wheel · free-assign slot to morph/cutoff/reso/level/pitch
- PRESETS: Category-foldered factory bank · user save/import/export · full patch recall
- EFFECTS: 8-stage stereo rack · tape, flutter, lo-fi, tape-stop
- VFX CHAIN: Wave warp, edge detect, perspective, affine, blur, mask · per-node wet/dry · baked into wavetable
- MIDI: Full CC learn on every control · pitch bend · persistent maps
- SYNC: Ableton Link · official LinkKit
- AU IDENTITY: aumu · Mesa · Tmpr
Launching on 9th August for £8.99 (other currencies tbc) and it’s a single purchase for use across iOS and macOS.
