Most physical modeling synths ask you to think in terms of strings, mallets, and strikes — a fairly literal simulation of an acoustic instrument. Jas-i Khorlo, a new free plugin from developer Aaron Jasinski, asks you to think in terms of orbits instead.
A cylinder, eight resonators, and rings that go around
At the center of Khorlo sits a modeled virtual glass cylinder, surrounded by up to eight resonators — string, bell, and membrane models among them — arranged in a circle around it. Rather than triggering those resonators directly, up to eight impulse rings rotate around the circle at adjustable speed and height, striking each resonator as they pass over it. You control which resonators each ring is allowed to contact, which ring travels how fast, and how high above the resonators it sits — and because multiple rings can be spinning at different speeds simultaneously, the result is a texture that’s inherently polyrhythmic and circulatory rather than built note-by-note.
It’s a genuinely different mental model for sound design: instead of programming a sequence of hits, you’re setting up an orbital system and listening to what falls out of it as the rings pass in and out of phase with each other.
What’s underneath it
Khorlo isn’t just the resonator engine — it ships with a dual-multimode filter offering six topologies, eight assignable modulators (ADSR envelopes, LFOs, and drawable custom shapes), four macro controls for collapsing complex parameter sets into single knobs, and ten reorderable effects including chorus, delay, and reverb. It comes with 135 presets to start from.
Getting it
Jas-i Khorlo is currently in public beta and free to download as VST3, AU, and CLAP plugins, with builds for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows, and Linux.