The top band is the memory — the map shows what has been carved, warm when fresh, verdigris as it ages. Below it, this track: the body that rings, what sets it in motion, the filter, the outputs.
A modal synth with hidden sympathetic strings, like a sitar's — except these tune themselves to the intervals you play most. Lean on fifths for an evening and every note you play gets answered a fifth away. What you stop playing fades.
It never records your notes and never plays them back. It remembers the interval, not the note — in one memory per machine, shared by every instance, that outlives the session.
New in 1.1.0 — PalimpsestFx. The same remembering strings as an audio effect, behind the synth of your choice, in the same box and on the same key. See how it works ↓
Think of a sitar, or a piano with the sustain pedal down: strings you don't touch ring along with the ones you do. Palimpsest has those hidden strings too — but they aren't tuned at random. They tune themselves to the intervals you play the most.
Seven short pieces. In each one, A is the MIDI played on a fresh Palimpsest — an ideal, untouched string — and the other buttons are the exact same MIDI played on a memory somebody else carved for eight minutes. Nothing else changes: not the preset, not a knob. Only what the instrument remembers.
Rendered in a real DAW with the shipping plugin, from the same MIDI files · loudness-matched (−18 LUFS) so the louder one never wins by default. Music: xeniclex.
The top band is the memory — the map shows what has been carved, warm when fresh, verdigris as it ages. Below it, this track: the body that rings, what sets it in motion, the filter, the outputs.
Every synth sounds the same on the day you buy it and on the day you sell it. Palimpsest doesn't: after a month it sounds like the way you play — and nobody else's does.
A player leans on fifths, then on thirds, then stops. Each interval inks its segment on the map, a sympathetic string tuned to it starts answering, and everything that is no longer played fades.
In the plugin, that's the map in the top band — twelve segments, one per pitch class, and a detail strip showing the forty modes actually sounding.
Engrave sets how strongly playing writes; Forgetting sets how long silence takes to erase. Load a memory somebody else carved — Gospel keys, Modal techno, Flamenco, Gamelan — play on top of it, and it becomes yours. Freeze one into a project when a track must stay the way it was recorded. And a Speed switch — ×1, ×10, ×100 — makes the whole machine remember and forget faster, to hear in a minute what would take a week.
The instance park at the right names every Palimpsest running on this machine and what each one is carving — all into the same memory.
Palimpsest's sympathetic strings, and the memory that shapes them, also ship as an audio effect. Put PalimpsestFx after any synth — yours, the one you already love — and the strings answer that sound, tuned by the intervals the machine has learned. It reads the very same memory Palimpsest reads and writes; what plays through it carves the memory too. Same installer, same key.
The top band is the memory, the same one the instrument shows. Below it, this track: which body rings, how loud the strings answer, how much the memory colours them — and where the notes come from.
Palimpsest never records your notes and never plays them back: your melody is exactly what you played, always. It is not a delay either — nothing is repeated. Playing wears the sound itself, slowly, the way footsteps wear a stone step. The demo carves the very same memory the full version inherits.
| Type | Instrument — MIDI in, three stereo outputs (Main, Bare, Wear) · PalimpsestFx: audio effect with MIDI in, mono or stereo · PalimpsestNotes: MIDI effect |
| Formats | VST3 · Audio Unit (macOS) · CLAP |
| Platforms | Windows 10/11 x64 · Linux x86-64 · macOS 10.13+ (universal, Intel & Apple Silicon) |
| Synthesis | Modal — 11 measured bodies, 6 exciters, 40 modes per voice, ladder filter, effects |
| Memory | One per machine, shared by every instance through lock-free shared memory; persisted on disk as user data, it survives sessions and reboots |
| What carves | Velocity × held length on any keyboard; pressure with an MPE controller |
| Presets | 84 factory presets in seven families, user presets, Program Change |
| Memories | Shipped memories, your own named memories, automatic backups, freeze into the project |
| Parameters | Automatable in VST3, AU and CLAP hosts · A/B · undo |
| Languages | Interface in English; hints, tour and info bar in EN · FR · DE · ES · IT · PT |
| Framework | Built with iPlug2 — open-source C++ audio plugin framework |
| License | Perpetual, all your machines, free updates. One key covers Palimpsest and PalimpsestFx; PalimpsestNotes needs none. Separate key from the other XeniAudio plugins. |
The demo is the whole instrument — every preset, every shipped memory, your settings saved with the session — and PalimpsestFx with it, in the same installer, under the same demo: the audio goes silent for five seconds every minute, in step across every instance. PalimpsestNotes has no demo limit. It keeps carving during the silence, and the memory you build in the demo is the one the full version inherits. Play it for real, over days, not over a test clip. No sign-up required.
The Windows installer isn't code-signed, so SmartScreen may flag an unknown publisher. It's not a detection — keep the file and open it.
C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\
and
C:\Program Files\Common Files\CLAP\
Nothing to do. The disk image, the installer and all three plugin bundles are signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, with the ticket stapled into the files so it works offline. The publisher shows as Tony Cuny — the legal name behind Xeni-Audio, which is what Apple puts on the certificate. Logic loads the AU with no workaround.
One license, all formats, all platforms, all your machines, forever.