Orrery

Get the highlights.

Eight planets, eight lanes. Each lane orbits at its own loop length, so the parts drift in and out of phase for hours, the way Eno's tape loops did.

Pick a mood, press play. Ambient, dark ambient, drone, sleep, meditation, focus and celestial, with five knobs that shape everything.

Every lane under your hand. Role, register, density, loops, Euclidean rhythm, echoes, a controller curve and analog drift, lane by lane.

Plays your hardware. Each lane can go to its own MIDI port and channel, with MIDI clock: one Orrery plays a whole rack.

Sessions that breathe. Set a length with slow fades, pace the music to your breathing and keep it gentle for sleep.

The film.

A brass orrery rendered in 3D, each planet turning at its own period. The sound is Orrery playing First Light through ATFS1, AT700 and AT101V.

See it play.

Each video is the plugin's own screen while it plays a factory preset. The sound is the clip from Hear it: the same variation makes the same notes, so every spark on screen lands on a note you hear.

Tape Loops. Five loops of 17, 21, 23, 29 and 31 beats, Eno style, over a soft pad.

Generative, not random.

All the lanes listen to one slow harmony. Chords change by fourths, fifths and thirds, pads move each voice to the nearest note of the next chord, melodies walk the scale in phrases with rests, and every note stays inside the key unless you raise the tension. Lanes can record what they play and repeat it as a loop of their own length, with small mutations each pass: loops of 17 and 23 beats only line up again after 391 beats.

It was tested like the instruments: ten minutes of seven lanes with no note outside the scale and no hanging note at stop, the same variation number playing the same notes, note for note, on macOS and Windows and at any buffer size or sample rate, and at most 37 MIDI messages per second on a channel across all factory presets, where a 5-pin MIDI cable carries about a thousand.

Lanes: 8, each with its own MIDI channel and role: drone, pad, melody, arpeggio, cloud, bass or pulse
Harmony: 16 scales and modes, chord colour from triads to elevenths, tension from consonant to clusters and tritones, slow walk, drone or two-chord progressions
Loops: record and repeat per lane, any length from 2 to 128 beats, with mutation
Rhythm: Euclidean patterns, probability, rates from 2 beats to 1/8, humanized timing
Expression: MIDI echoes, a controller curve per lane (sine, drift, breath, swell), pitch-bend drift for analog warmth
Session: length with fades in and out, breathing pace, gentle mode
Outputs: DAW MIDI, direct MIDI ports per lane, MIDI clock, Lead and Follow link between instances, built-in preview sound

8

lanes, each on its own MIDI channel

16

scales and modes

21

presets in seven moods

<0.01%

of a CPU core for the generator

Hear it.

Every clip is Orrery generating live from a factory preset, with no edits. Each lane was then played by one of our instruments from the MIDI it generated, and the lanes were mixed at a matched level. Download the MIDI and send it to your own synths.

First Light
Ambient: drone on AT700, pad, flute and bells on ATFS1, sub bass on AT101V.

1:08 MIDI
Tape Loops
Five loops of 17, 21, 23, 29 and 31 beats, Eno style, over a soft pad.

1:08 MIDI
Undertow
Dark ambient in C Phrygian with drifting pitch and a filter on a random walk.

1:08 MIDI
Tanpura
A drone with a four-note string pattern that never changes key.

1:08 MIDI
Breath Six
Meditation at six breaths per minute: the choir swells as you breathe in.

1:08 MIDI
Orbiting
Celestial in E Lydian: a Euclidean arpeggio, high bells and a glass choir.

1:08 MIDI
Night Garden
Sleep mood with Orrery's own preview sound, gentle mode on.

1:08 MIDI

Pick a mood. Press play.

The Simple page is all most people need: seven moods with 21 presets, five knobs that shape everything at once (density, motion, space, brightness and tension), a key, a scale and a session timer. The orrery in the middle shows what is playing: one orbit per lane, the chord in the sun, a spark for every note.

Orrery is a music tool for relaxation and focus. It is not a medical device and makes no therapeutic claims.

Every lane under your hand.

The Advanced pages open the whole machine, one column per lane.

Roles. Drones hold the root, pads voice-lead the chords, melodies phrase and rest, arpeggios and pulses follow Euclidean patterns, clouds scatter glass-like notes, basses anchor.
Eno loops. Give lanes loops of different lengths and they drift in and out of phase for hours.
Controllers. Each lane can draw a slow curve on any CC (74 for the filter, 1 for the mod wheel, 11 for expression) and wander in pitch like an old oscillator.
Capture. Save the last minutes as a MIDI file, one track per channel, and drag it into your DAW.

Orrery's Lanes page — The Lanes page: 29 settings for each of the 8 lanes.

Plays your hardware, and every DAW.

Every lane always reaches the DAW on its own channel. Beyond that, each lane can go straight to a MIDI port: a hardware synth's USB or MIDI interface, or a virtual port to reach other tracks.

Hardware. Pick a port per lane, send MIDI clock, and one Orrery plays a whole rack of synths.
Ableton Live. Live merges channels between tracks, so use a virtual port (IAC on macOS, loopMIDI on Windows) or one Orrery per track with Link: the Lead shares its chords and the Followers play over them.
Tuning. A reference pitch from 415 to 466 Hz applied by pitch bend, for synths that cannot retune.
Preview sound. A small built-in synth with a long reverb, so it plays the moment you open it.

Orrery's Outputs page — The Outputs page: a port and a channel for each lane, clock, link and tuning.

Seven moods.

3

Ambient

Slow chords, a voice and glass in the distance, and Eno-style tape loops.

3

Dark ambient

Low, minor and unresolved: Phrygian, harmonic minor and drifting pitch.

3

Drone

A centre that barely moves, a tanpura pattern and a monolith.

6

Sleep and meditation

Long sessions with slow fades, breathing pace, gentle mode.

3

Focus

Steady and quiet, with no surprises.

3

Celestial

Bright, high and wide: Lydian, whole-tone, starfields.

Tech specs.

Generator

8 lanes with roles: drone, pad, melody, arpeggio, cloud, bass, pulse
Shared slow harmony: 16 scales and modes, chord colour, tension, three progression types, voice leading
Per-lane loops (2-128 beats) with mutation, Euclidean rhythms, probability, MIDI echoes
Variation number: the same settings and number always give the same music

Simple and advanced

7 moods with 21 presets, 5 macro knobs, key, scale, session and breathing
29 settings per lane, harmony, session and output pages
Capture of the last 1-10 minutes as a MIDI file to drag into the DAW

Calm listening

Sessions up to 2 hours with fade in and fade out (velocity and CC7)
Breathing pace from 1 to 12 breaths per minute
Gentle mode: softer, lower, smaller leaps, little tension

Outputs

MIDI to the DAW, one channel per lane
Direct MIDI ports per lane (hardware, IAC, loopMIDI) with MIDI clock
Lead and Follow link between instances
Controller curves and pitch-bend drift; reference pitch 415-466 Hz by pitch bend
Built-in preview sound with reverb

Formats

VST3 (with MIDI output), Audio Unit (macOS) and standalone app

Minimum

macOS Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later), or Intel Core i5 quad-core from 2017 or later, with macOS 11 Big Sur or later.
Windows PC with Intel Core i5-6500 (6th generation, 2015) or AMD Ryzen 5 1600, or better, with Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
4 GB of RAM, a 1280 × 800 screen and a 64-bit host for VST3 or Audio Unit, or the standalone app.
Disk space: 36 MB on macOS (all formats), 11 MB on Windows.

Measured CPU load

Setting	Apple M4	AMD Ryzen 9 5900XT
The generator: 8 busy lanes with loops, echoes and controller curves	< 0.01 %	< 0.01 %
With the built-in preview sound and its reverb	1.6 %	3.8 %

Percentage of one CPU core at 48 kHz, sound engine only. With the editor open, the interface adds about 4 % on the M4. Hosts run each instrument on one core, so single-core speed is what counts.

Download Orrery 1.0.0.

Free, no account, no activation, no telemetry.

macOS

macOS 11 or later. Apple silicon and Intel in one universal binary. VST3, Audio Unit and standalone app. 15 MB.

Download for macOS

How to install

Unzip the file.
Copy Orrery.vst3 to ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3.
Copy Orrery.component to ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components.
In Ableton Live use the VST3: Audio Units cannot send MIDI to other tracks there.

Windows

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. VST3 and standalone app. 5 MB.

Download for Windows