Lunacy makes “sonic playgrounds for music makers,” with several popular plugins like granular synth engine Grains and the Beam effects rack. This year they dropped a couple freebies, the best of which is called Haze.

Haze is a “chorus and phase effect.” In practice, you can make absolutely huge sounds with Haze without a great deal of input. Haze blurs, diffuses and smears sounds, and works best when you have a short passage of several notes or sounds to start with.

The controls are arranged underneath a trippy alien take on a waveform that looks like some next generation iTunes visualizer or the kind of big abstract LED light show you might have seen Daft Punk standing in front of. The user interface on Haze is incredibly nice to work with.

The first three controls are Decay, Density and Spread, and these alone are intriguing enough. If you had to put a name to it, you’d say the output generated is “ethereal” or “celestial.” It can be further adjusted using Haze’s Scale and Motion controls. There is also a Smear filter with separate Frequency and Q controls, which I haven’t been able to really master but promises an “even denser, dreamier sound” than you can get from the first five controls alone.

Lunacy has made Haze available as a free VST and there’s no catch to this: it’s a fully functional version, prepackaged with 20 presets to start.

⚪️ more music making apps and plugins /

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⚙  Hands-on looping with Audio Damage’s Circa
⚙  Download ReCycle and sample like it’s 1994 again