Slab 0.0.11

Strings you can play. Slab gains a modeled electric bass and guitar that
bend, slide, hammer on and pull off like the real thing, an amp and
cabinet to plug them into, a shelf of orchestral and band samples that
ship in the box, and a ballad to hear it all on.

Fretwire: modeled bass and guitar

• Fretwire, a modeled electric bass. A new instrument that plays a
  bass string rather than a recording of one: each note's pluck, decay,
  pitch glide and tone depend on how hard you play, where the string is
  plucked and heard, and which string and fret the note falls on.
  Presets for fingers, the bridge pickup, pick, slap, pop, flatwounds and
  palm muting. Its tone is a direct recording's; put an amp after it.
• Fretwire Guitar. The same waveguide string strung as a six-string
  electric guitar, fitted to a sampled guitar, with presets for the neck
  and bridge pickups, fingerstyle, funk, jazz, palm muting and slide.
• Bend and slide. A note's pitch curve bends the string smoothly, or
  with MOTION on SLIDE moves it fret by fret with the rasp of a finger on
  the windings. AUTO tells them apart: a curve that goes further than a
  string can bend becomes a slide.
• Hammer-ons and pull-offs. A note that overlaps the one before it
  (up to a fourth away, in a single-note line) plays on the same ringing
  string: the finger hammers on or pulls off instead of plucking again.
  Chords and strums are left alone.
• Finger vibrato. A note's slide expression is its vibrato depth:
  draw it rising under a held bend and the string sings, pushed sharp and
  back like a guitarist's finger. VIBRATO RATE and DEPTH on the panel.
• Ampstack, an amp and cabinet for bass and guitar. Four amp voices
  (a tube bass head, a clean American combo, British crunch and high
  gain), each with its own three-knob tone stack that interacts like the
  real circuit, a power amp that sags, five speaker cabinets with a mic
  position, and a DI blend for bass. Presets for bass and guitar.

Sounds and songs

• More instruments ship with Slab: violin, viola and cello sections,
  contrabass pizzicato, trumpet and trombone (from VSCO 2 CE), two
  fingered electric basses, a clean electric guitar and an alto sax
  (from Karoryfer), all CC0 and ready in the sampler without a download.
  The full Karoryfer and VSCO libraries are new packs in the Library.
• Long Light, a new demo song: a slow rock ballad whose guitar solo
  bends, slides, hammers on and shakes its notes, after David Gilmour.
• Strummed guitar in slabkit. clip.strums(prog, "D.DU.UDU") plays a
  progression as a guitarist would: real chord shapes (open chords, barre
  shapes up the neck), down strums low to high and up strums over the top
  strings, the pick's timing across them, softer strings as it goes, and
  dead strums. clip.strum is one strum.

Audio files

• FLAC files import as audio clips: Import audio… and the sampler's
  file picker accept .flac, and the browser lists FLAC samples in your
  Samples folder, a project's audio and library packs.
• AIFF files load. The import picker offered .aif but couldn't read
  it. AIFF and AIFF-C (16/24/32-bit, little-endian sowt, float) now
  import as audio clips, load in the sampler and keymaps with their loop
  and root note, and show in the browser.

Docs

• A composing walkthrough (docs/33) takes you from a musical brief to an
  editable sketch with GEQ, a shared delay and a mix and stem export; the
  production guide is updated for sends, clip automation and GEQ.

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Apple Silicon, macOS 13 or later. Built from v0.0.11, which is its complete source (GPL-3.0-or-later, see COPYING.md).

Install:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/nooga/slab/releases/latest/download/install.sh | bash

Or with Homebrew: brew install --cask nooga/tap/slab

Or open the DMG and drag Slab to Applications. It is not notarized, so the first launch needs System Settings > Privacy & Security > Open Anyway.