Solstice by Minuit - Spectral Sample-Map Synth

Turn any sample into an explorable landscape.

Solstice makes any sample into a unique, playable map, revealing hidden textures within your sounds. Made with ambient, experimental, and aleatoric music in mind, but versatile enough for any genre.

3 ways to navigate

Solstice generates a unique map for each sample, clustering frames by timbre similarity. Click anywhere to play, drag to morph between timbres, or let it drift into patterns you didn't know were there.

Click and drag to play textures on the map. Immediate and exploratory.

Factory presets + artist packs

Solstice comes with 60 factory samples and 65 presets, categorized and tagged. Filter by mode, style, or favorites.

melodic

drone gently

flutes

crystal

glitch

twinkle twinkle

marimba

round and round

noise

between stations

birds

pulverising

But more is more, so we’re also committed to regularly release preset packs created in collaboration with artists and sound designers.

🪬 john hassell

John Hassell is an Anglo-Australian producer based in Marseille. He is a member of electronic acts Seekae and Brutalist. The pack features an unsettling, yet remindful mixture of textures, vocals and strings.

folk sulk

lulu

🚰 imago meri

Imago Meri is a producer duo based between Italy and Germany. The pack drifts from sharp, piercing metallic tones into softer, more delicate timbral textures.

argument

spiel

👽 ed ten eyck

Ed Ten Eyck is a California-based musician and synth sound designer. This pack leans into pads, atmospheres, plucks, and short keyed attacks.

down the hole

drone guitar

🩻 data broth

Data Broth is a sound designer and musician. Dark ambient tones and textures for mysterious moods, abandoned spacecrafts, and liminal back-rooms.

amniotic

mysterious awakening

⭕ ripperton

Ripperton is a Swiss producer and sound designer, weaving sonic tapestries from Lausanne’s misty shores.

phosphène

train de nuit

🌊 waves

A pack of traditional wave shapes with complex morphing patterns.

fools gold

horizon

Import your own samples

Arguably the most fun part of Solstice is bringing in your own samples to generate unique maps. Solstice processes and organises all frames of the sample into a multi-dimensional latent space, before projecting it back in 2D. Similar timbres cluster into dense regions of small cells, while larger cells correspond to unique sounds in the sample - exposing underlying patterns in the sound.

In-depth control

spectral controls

5 parameters for a curated manipulation of phase and partials. Add movement, control noise, and tune harmonic content with texture, tilt, flutter, stretch and bloom.

cascading reverb

The reverb self-oscillates by design. Pushing up decay and tone creates cascading feedback, lowering the tone will darken the sound.

quality repitching

No-artifact frequency-domain pitch shifting, over 8 octaves. Choose between crisp for high quality shifting, or lofi for more texture.

Powered by spectral synthesis

Unlike granular synthesis, which loops tiny slices of the waveform, Solstice freezes the actual frequency content of each moment. Moving between points will morph these frozen spectra smoothly.

Free 14-day trial

The free trial version is fully featured, and Solstice will continue to work in your DAW project after the trial has expired.

Read the manual

FAQs

Is Solstice a granular synthesizer?

No, Solstice is a spectral synthesizer. Granular synthesis works by looping frames (grains) in the sample. Spectral synthesis freezes a sound in time using similar techniques to high quality time-stretching algorithms. Just imagine that it’s knitting all the independent frequencies together (like a lovely sound scarf), rather than doing a patchwork of samples (like granular synthesis).

Does Solstice have built-in modulation?

Not in the traditional sense, though that doesn’t mean you can’t get a lot of movement in the resulting sound. Path and drift mode let you parameterise the motion of the cursor, with additional randomisation. And every parameter is automatable, including the cursor position on the map and on the waveform.

Does Solstice support polyphonic expression and microtuning?

Yes, both MPE and MTS-ESP are supported. For MPE, you can select lower/upper zone & PB range. Slide is also mappable to some of our spectral effects (tilt, texture, stretch, bloom) for per-voice effect routing.

What’s Solstice’s CPU usage?

We’re “surprisingly low” by most synth standards, however if you are finding it too high, you can enable the (experimental) multicore support.

Tech specs

Compatible OS

MacOS 12.0+ | Windows 10+

Available formats

AU (Mac), VST3 (Mac, Windows)

MIDI capabilities

MPE | MTS-ESP

Size

114mb

Contents

60 samples | 65 presets | 6 artist packs

Supported audio files

WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3

Turn any sample into an explorable landscape.

3 ways to navigate

Static