Tenebrae v0.1.0

Tenebrae is a high-gain rhythm-guitar distortion plugin in the Basilica Audio suite — sacred-architecture DSP for heavy music: a tightening high-pass ahead of a cascade of three oversampled waveshaper stages (each progressively tighter and darker than the last), followed by a passive-style 3-band tone stack. It has no cabinet simulation of its own — in a heavy production chain it sits after the input/gate stage and before a cab sim/IR loader, providing the core "chug" tone that the rest of the chain voices and glues together.

This is the first tagged release (v0.1.0), covering the M1 milestone: core DSP completion and broadened test coverage.

What's new in 0.1.0

Added

• Project bootstrap: README, license, contributing guide, architecture and build docs, ADRs, and CI workflow.
• DSP core: initial working Tenebrae signal path (Tight HPF, Gain, 3-stage oversampled waveshaper cascade, 3-band tone stack, Level, delay-compensated dry/wet Mix) with unit tests.
• Voicing parameter (Tight/Loose): switches the fixed cascade drive/asymmetry/interstage-filter constants between the original "Tight" cascade and a new, softer-driven, wider-band "Loose" alternative. Both cascade triplets are fully preallocated so switching is allocation-free.
• Bright parameter: fixed pre-cascade high-shelf switch (+5 dB @ 3.5 kHz), modelled on a high-gain amp channel's bright switch, feeding a brighter signal into the cascade's nonlinearity rather than just re-EQing the already-clipped output.
• Tone Voice parameter (Flat/Scoop/Boost): a fixed dB tilt added on top of the live Bass/Mid/Treble tone-stack bands, for one-switch access to canned high-gain-rhythm tone shapes (a "smiley" scoop curve and a mid-forward boost curve) without overriding the individual band knobs.
• docs/manual.md: full user manual (what the plugin is, where it sits in a heavy production chain, signal flow, complete parameter reference, usage tips).

Changed

• Tone stack corner frequencies refined against typical high-gain rhythm voicings: Mid peak moved from 800 Hz to 650 Hz with a narrower Q (0.8 -> 1.1) for a more surgical scoop, and the Treble shelf moved from 3000 Hz to 3500 Hz to sit at a more typical amp "presence" corner.
• Broadened the Catch2 suite from 26 to 36 test cases: sample-rate sweeps (44.1-192 kHz), mono/stereo bus-layout coverage, a longer-running (400-block) NaN/Inf automation soak test, exhaustive Voicing/Bright/Tone Voice combination coverage, and dedicated tests for every new parameter (state round-trip, defaults/ranges, DSP-level effect).

Fixed

• TenebraeEngine::outputLevel (the Level gain stage) was never primed with a starting gain in prepare(); since juce::dsp::Gain default-constructs its internal smoothed value to linear zero (silence) rather than unity, any prepare() call not immediately preceded by a fresh setLevelDb() call produced a permanently silent wet path. This never reached the shipped plugin (PluginProcessor::prepareToPlay() always seeds Level from the host/session state first) but was a real trap for anything exercising TenebraeEngine directly, found via the broadened mono-bus test coverage above. Fixed by re-priming outputLevel from a new lastLevelDb member on every prepare(), matching the existing lastGainDb/lastTightHz pattern.

Supported formats

• Plugin formats: AU, VST3, Standalone
• Platforms: macOS (Universal Binary: arm64 + x86_64), Windows (x64)

Installation

Download the zip for your OS below, unzip, and copy the plugin into your system's plugin folder:

• macOS: AU -> ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/, VST3 -> ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/. Standalone app can be run directly from wherever you unzip it (or moved to /Applications).
• Windows: VST3 -> C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\. Standalone app can be run directly from wherever you unzip it.

Rescan plugins in your DAW after installing.

Signed & notarized

The macOS binaries in this release are Developer-ID-signed, notarized by Apple and stapled — they install and open without Gatekeeper warnings. (Windows binaries remain unsigned for now; Authenticode signing is tracked as roadmap milestone M4.)