Work

Twenty-six machines for the Ableton Move — twenty-one effects and six sources — as a Schwung module. A source stage followed by two insert FX, in series, each holding one machine, plus three FX LFOs and a modulation envelope that can modulate any of their parameters.

Loading a sampler costs you no insert: sources have their own stage. Each stage only accepts machines from its own family and says so rather than substituting something near enough, so the pads only ever offer what the focused stage will actually take.

Clean-room: every machine is an original DSP implementation, written from published descriptions of the effect it is named for — documented parameter names, ranges and behaviour — rather than from anyone's source. No third-party code and no factory content, and not a bit-exact emulation of anything. See docs/REFERENCE.md.

The machines

Bypass	Decimator	Endless Flanger	Roomtone Reverb
Clock Pitch	Gritshaper	Low-Pass Filter	Drive Delay
Comb ± Filter	Fold Filter	Multimode Filter	Iron Room Reverb
Compressor	Filterbank	Wide Chorus	Voidspace Reverb
Chain Delay	Spectrum Bender	Phase Array	Flutter
			Granulator

A few of the less obvious ones:

• Clock Pitch — granular pitch shifter with feedback, so held notes climb or fall in steps rather than sitting at one interval.
• Comb ± Filter — the FREQ knob is bipolar and its sign flips the comb's polarity: positive feedback sounds like a plucked string, negative like a stopped pipe.
• Spectrum Bender — a true single-sideband frequency shifter (Hilbert pair), not a pitch shifter. Intervals go inharmonic. SBND blends the two sidebands.
• Endless Flanger — barber-pole motion: three crossfaded taps so the sweep appears to rise or fall forever without turning around.
• Fold Filter — high-pass, then a wavefolder, then a morphing multimode filter, then distortion. Adds overtones rather than removing them.
• Granulator — granulates the last two seconds of live input, or the loaded sample when there is one. Eight knobs and a fixed Hann window, rather than the three pages of grain controls a dedicated granulator would give you.
• The three reverbs are three algorithms — a Schroeder comb bank with early reflections, a Dattorro plate, and a Householder feedback delay network.

Two builds

Work is the audio_fx build — it drops into a Signal Chain slot or a Master FX slot and processes whatever is upstream.

Overwork is the overtake build. It takes over Move's whole surface and runs the same machines on the live input (mic / line / USB-C), with a 64-step sequencer driving parameter locks, and a preset browser.

Why the surface maps so cleanly

The gesture that defines hardware step sequencing — hold a step, turn an encoder, and that step remembers the value — needs eight encoders and a row of trig keys under your fingers at once. Move has both, so this is a 1:1 map rather than an approximation:

What it needs	Move
8 rotary encoders	the 8 knobs
16 trig keys	the 16 step buttons
a data encoder	the jog wheel
hold trig + turn encoder = p-lock	hold step + turn knob = p-lock

That last row is the whole point. The gesture survives intact.

In Overwork the 32 pads are free for what a hardware sequencer spends menus on: rows 1–3 are a machine palette for the focused stage (tap to load one), and row 4 is transport, pattern pages, copy/paste and clear — with Shift turning its last four into the step-attribute modes.

Steps carry trig conditions (FILL, PRE, 1ST, A:B ratios, probabilities), micro-timing (±23/24 of a step), and retrig. Each firing trig is a complete snapshot: parameters it locks take their locked value, parameters it doesn't revert to base.

Install

schwung-manager → Install Custom Module, pointed at timncox/schwung-work for Work, timncox/schwung-work-in for Work In, or timncox/schwung-overwork for Overwork.

Full manual: https://timncox.github.io/schwung-work/

Build and test

make test        # engine (414) + UI harness (47) + site-vs-engine (44)
make sanitize    # the engine suite under ASan + UBSan
make bench       # per-machine cost ranking
make arm         # Docker cross-compile for the Move + both tarballs

The UI harness mocks the host against a contract generated from the engine (test/dump_contract.c), so a UI that reads a key the DSP doesn't serve fails in CI rather than on hardware.

Deployed to hardware, but nothing has been verified by ear yet.

Roadmap

1. The FX machines — audio_fx build: Signal Chain and Master FX slots. done
2. Overwork — the overtake build: step buttons as trig keys, machine palette, hold-step-and-turn parameter locks, trig conditions, micro-timing. done
3. Presets, three distinct reverb algorithms, and Granulator. done (v0.2.0)
4. The remaining source machines — Polysample, Slicer, Wavescan. done (v0.7.0). Sample loading goes through the UI in chunks, because the DSP has no filesystem access and set_param has a 16 KB ceiling.

Siblings

Other Schwung modules in this family: Smack (loop glitcher), Mark (5-track looper), Belt (vocal processor), Mono (machine synth).

MIT licensed.