PhaseCanon
4-Voice MIDI Manipulator
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Phase Canon is available on Gumroad: https://brettdooley.gumroad.com/l/phasecanon
It is free. Enter $0 and download it.
If you feel like supporting it, donations are appreciated. I promise to buy coffee
with it.
Music is patterns.
Phase Canon is a small machine for bending those patterns without breaking them.
It listens to what you play. Then it repeats it: shifted, stretched, reversed,
layered, and mathematically locked into key.
A simple phrase becomes motion. A chord becomes architecture. A loop becomes
something that feels like it was planned.
Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn’t.
What It Does
Phase Canon is a 4-voice MIDI looper and manipulator.
You feed it a riff. It plays that riff back through four independent playheads.
Each voice can:
- Run at a different speed
- Start at a different phase
- Play forward, backward, or ping-pong
- Transpose independently
- Lock into a defined key and scale
- Be switched off entirely when you don’t need it
The result is structured movement. Interlocking patterns. Controlled chaos if
you want it. A simple progression can turn into something layered and alive very
quickly.
How It Works
Insert Phase Canon on a MIDI track. Route its MIDI output to your synths.
Arm the buffer. Play a phrase. Let the four voices reinterpret it.
Re-arming mid-session is your emergency eject and your record button at the same
time. It silences all active voices, wipes the buffer, and starts capturing fresh
material immediately. One button. No separate Clear needed.
Global controls manage loop length, key and scale quantization, polyphony, and
humanization. Every transposed note snaps to the nearest valid scale degree so
the harmony stays intact no matter how far you push the voices apart. You can
also enforce strict last-note priority with the global or per-voice polyphony
limits.
Each voice has independent control over rate, phase, direction, MIDI channel,
velocity, and transpose. You can even toggle voices off entirely to save
polyphony when you do not need them.
It is precise. It is predictable. It can also spiral beautifully.
Important Note About Saving
The internal loop buffer does not save with your DAW session.
If you close the session, the captured material is gone.
If you build something worth keeping, you should:
- Record your original MIDI input so you can re-capture it later
- Record the MIDI output to another track
- Or print the result to audio
Phase Canon is a creative engine, not an archive.
Compatibility
Windows only. VST3. Verified in Reaper.
Phase Canon is a MIDI effect plugin: MIDI in, MIDI out, no audio. Not every DAW
routes MIDI through plugins correctly. If you are not on Reaper, it may work or
it may not. You will need to sort that out for your setup.
I built this because I wanted a fast, minimal canon engine that respected musical
structure and didn’t waste time.
If it sparks something interesting in your work, that’s the point.
Brett Dooley
See my other midi vst: https://brettdooley.com/midivst/