Audio Damage AD-202 v1.0.5 [WiN-MAC-LiNUX]

• Developer: Audio Damage
• Version: 1.0.5
• Format: VST3, AU, AAX, CLAP, LV2
• File Sizes: 76 MB, 193 MB, 81 MB
• Requirements: Windows 10/11 (64-bit), macOS 10.13+ (Intel or Apple Silicon), Ubuntu 20+

AD-202 is a single-oscillator monosynth in the small-grey-box tradition of the early 1980s. One VCO with saw, pulse, sub, and noise running into a 24 dB ladder filter, one envelope, one LFO, and very little else. All main controls are on the front panel, and there is exactly one path from a knob to a sound.

Under the vintage panel it is a thoroughly modern instrument. Mono or eight-voice poly, per-voice analog drift, a tempo-syncable LFO with a delayed onset, MPE, MTS-ESP microtuning, and a post-VCA color section with pre-filter saturation, filter drive, distortion, and a tilt EQ. The vintage part is the ergonomics. The rest of it is not vintage at all.

And it has the sequencer the original was famous for. Press SEQ and a bassline sequencer opens under the keyboard: eight patterns of up to 64 steps, each step a pitch with accent, slide, and an octave flag, follow actions and repeats per pattern, swing, and a tool row for randomizing in a key and scale, mutating a pattern as it plays, copying, clearing, and rotating. It runs on its own clock with tap tempo, follows the host transport, or joins an Ableton Link session in the standalone. Sequences save with your presets.

In Use…

Bass lines first, obviously. Sub oscillator up, a little resonance, short decay, and the envelope into the filter is most of what anyone wants out of a box like this. Past that, the delayed LFO onset is the sleeper control: set a slow triangle with a second or so of delay and held notes bloom into vibrato on their own, which is a hard thing to automate and a trivial thing to play. Poly mode with Spread and Age up turns the same patch into a wide, slightly out of tune pad that no single hardware unit could have made. And the Post Dist and Tilt controls in the MODS panel exist because we kept reaching for a distortion box and an EQ on the channel anyway.

The sequencer earns its keep the same way the hardware’s did. Sixteen steps, a couple of accents, one slide, and a filter you ride by hand is a whole genre. When that gets old, RAND in a key and scale gives you a new line to argue with, and MUTATE lets the pattern drift while you play the rest of the panel.

Features

• Single VCO with four footages – 16′, 8′, 4′, and 2′ from a alias-free sawtooth and a two-saw pulse that stays free of DC at any width. Pulse width is manual, or modulated by the LFO or the envelope.
• Sub oscillator – A flip-flop divider off the main oscillator, running one octave down, two octaves down, or a two-octave pulse, filtered and DC blocked the same way the hardware divider chain was.
• Source mixer with pre-filter saturation – Independent levels for saw, pulse, sub, and noise, summed into a soft clipper. The Pre-Filter Sat control pushes up to eight times as hard into that clipper without makeup gain, so the mixer overdrives the way it does when you run all four sources wide open.
• 24 dB ladder filter – Resonant four-pole low pass with its own Drive control, soft clipping in the feedback path, and gain compensation so the level does not fall away as you push it. Cutoff is swept by the envelope, the LFO, keyboard tracking, and velocity, each with its own amount.
• One ADSR, shared – Time based exponential segments with the same retrigger behaviour as the original: a new attack starts from wherever the envelope currently sits rather than from zero. The VCA runs from the envelope or straight off the gate.
• LFO with delayed onset – Triangle, square, stepped random, and sample and hold noise, from 0.1 Hz to 30 Hz or synced to host tempo. The Delay control ramps the depth in over as much as four seconds from each new gate, so vibrato arrives after the note does. Optional per-note retrigger.
• Three trigger modes – Gate takes the lowest note and reuses the voice, Gate plus Trig takes the last note and retriggers the envelope, and LFO retriggers the envelope once per LFO cycle for the rolling pattern the hardware was known for.
• Portamento – Up to five seconds of glide, with an Auto mode that only glides between overlapping notes, and a fixed Tune control of plus or minus 50 cents.
• Bassline sequencer – Eight patterns of up to 64 sixteenth steps, drawn right on the panel, with accent, slide, and octave per step. Follow actions and repeat counts chain the patterns, swing pushes the off-beats, Key Trig plays a pattern from a held key, and MIDI Trans transposes it from the keyboard. RAND builds a pattern in a key and scale, MUTATE changes it as it plays. Internal clock with tap tempo, host sync, and Ableton Link in the standalone. LOCK holds the sequence while you browse presets.
• Mono or eight-voice poly – The same voice, allocated eight ways, with equal power panning across the stereo field set by Spread. Mono mode holds the original note priority stack, legato behaviour, and auto-glide rules intact.
• Age – Per-voice fixed random drift across pitch, pulse width, cutoff, LFO rate, and mixer levels, rolled fresh for every instance of the plugin. Two copies of AD-202 in the same project are never quite the same synthesizer, which is the point.
• Output stage – Post-VCA distortion and a bipolar tilt EQ pivoting at 1 kHz, both in the MODS panel, for the pedal and the channel EQ you were going to reach for anyway.
• MPE and aftertouch routing – Full MPE with per-note pitch bend and pressure, four aftertouch destinations (oscillator mod depth, filter mod depth, filter cutoff, LFO rate), and separate attack and release smoothing for pressure.
• MTS-ESP microtuning – Continuous retuning from any MTS-ESP master, applied per note and per voice, with glide preserved across a retune.
• Velocity – Independent velocity amounts to the amplifier and to the filter, both subtractive, so full velocity plays the panel setting and lighter playing pulls back from it.

New in Version 1.0.5

• A sequencer. Click SEQ and a bassline step sequencer opens in a band below the keyboard: eight patterns of up to 64 steps, each step accented, slid into the next, or pushed by octaves either way; follow actions and repeat counts chain the patterns into an arrangement; swing, and a row of tools for randomizing, varying, copying, clearing and rotating. A realtime mutation panel alters the pattern on its way out without altering what you wrote.