DEEPFIELD

01Welcome to DEEPFIELD

One small window that holds whole galaxies. DEEPFIELD stacks two reverb engines, drifts between them on an orbit, sends the tail travelling round a sphere around you, and lets the space itself sing and rumble.

DEEPFIELD works perfectly well as a studio reverb: put OBSERVATORY in a slot, pick a hall or a room, set the mix and get on with your song. But it was built for the spaces that don't exist anywhere else: tails that last a minute and swell inward, plates that flare when you hit them, cathedrals whose pitch bends as they fade, and clouds of sound that move slowly from one world into another.

What makes it different

• Two engines, one space. Any of twelve engines in either slot, side by side or one feeding the other.
• GALACTIC SHIFT. MORPH between the two slots by hand, or let the orbit drift between them on its own.
• SPIRAL. The tail travels round a sphere around you: left and right, behind you, over the top and underneath.
• PARTIALS. A set of tuned partials that ring out of the tail itself and bring the reverb to life.
• RUMBLE. A sub octave, a rolling low growl and a DARK control for depth and darkness under the space.
• The Sequoia way of playing. Drag modulation onto any knob, map any MIDI controller to anything, and roll a brand-new sound in one click, with a back button for when you go too far.

About this manual

Control names are shown as they appear in the window, for example DECAY. Ranges are given as lowest to highest with the default in brackets. Chapters 7 to 14 follow the path the sound takes through the plugin, so you can read them in order or jump straight to the module you're looking at.

02Installing

DEEPFIELD comes as VST3, AU, AUv3 and CLAP plugins. Install the formats your DAW uses; installing all of them does no harm.

macOS

1. Unzip the download and open Terminal (Applications › Utilities › Terminal).
2. Type bash followed by a space.
3. Drag Install DEEPFIELD.command from the unzipped folder into the Terminal window, then press Return.
4. Restart your DAW and rescan plugins. DEEPFIELD is listed under Sequoia Synthesizers Co.

The installer copies each format to the folder your DAW reads and clears the download block macOS puts on files from the internet.

Installing by hand

In Finder, choose Go › Go to Folder… and paste the path. Then paste this one line into Terminal to clear the download block (it asks for your Mac password; nothing shows while you type, which is normal):

xattr -cr ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins; sudo xattr -cr /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins

Windows

1. Unzip the download, right-click Install DEEPFIELD (Windows).bat and choose Run as administrator.
2. Restart your DAW and rescan plugins.

If Windows shows "Windows protected your PC", click More info, then Run anyway.

03Activating your licence / free trial

DEEPFIELD comes with a 14-day free trial. Everything works, and there is nothing to sign up for. The first time you open DEEPFIELD, a short welcome card explains how the trial works.

To unlock DEEPFIELD for good, buy it at sequoiasynths.com. Your licence key appears on the thank-you page and comes by email, with a .seqlicence file.

1. Open DEEPFIELD and click the trial status at the bottom of the window, or right-click HELP and choose Licence...
2. Paste your key (it starts with SEQ-), or drop the .seqlicence file onto the panel.
3. That's it: DEEPFIELD is unlocked on this computer, in every project, and every open DEEPFIELD window unlocks at once.

DEEPFIELD checks your key on your computer. It needs no internet connection and no account, and it never sends anything anywhere. Your licences are kept in ~/Library/Application Support/Sequoia Synthesizers/Licences on a Mac and %APPDATA%\Sequoia Synthesizers\Licences on Windows. Keep your .seqlicence file somewhere safe: it activates DEEPFIELD on your other computers too.

04Quick start

Five minutes from an empty insert to your first galaxy.

1. Insert DEEPFIELD on a track with something sustained on it: a pad, a vocal, a guitar chord. On a send/return bus, turn MIX to 100%.
2. Pick a preset. Click the preset name in the header and try Nebulae › Deep Field, then step through the others with the ‹ › arrows. Each category leans a different way.
3. Set the size of the space. SIZE and DECAY in the SPACE panel are the two big ones: how big, and how long.
4. Move it. Turn REACH up in GALACTIC SHIFT and the sound drifts between the two engines on its own. Turn SPIRAL up and it travels round you. Headphones make SPIRAL obvious.
5. Bring it to life. Turn AMOUNT up in PARTIALS and the tail starts to sing. Add RUMBLE or SUB for depth underneath.

05The window

Everything is on one page. The header holds presets and the global tools, the panels follow the sound, and the modulation sources sit along the bottom.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

Working with the controls

The LED meter

The meter at the far right of the header, and the one beside INPUT, show the level with two rows of eleven square, domed LEDs (left channel on top, right below), labelled from -24 up to +6 in 3 dB steps. Green is comfortable, yellow (-3 and 0) is getting hot, and red (+3 and +6) is too loud. When the level reaches the red, CLIP lights.

The gear (settings and manual)

The Sequoia gear at the top-left corner of the window opens a menu with the manual, window size, the welcome screen, your licence, your presets folder, our website and About DEEPFIELD.

The welcome window

The first time you open DEEPFIELD on a computer, a welcome window appears with the name, a short hello, the version and buttons to GET STARTED or OPEN MANUAL. It only appears once on each computer. Bring it back any time with Welcome screen in the gear menu.

A / B, undo, size and the preset menu

A / B (in the header, right of SAVE). Two complete settings to compare. The lit letter is the one you hear: click the other letter to switch. The first time you click B it starts as a copy of A. The arrow between them copies the lit setting into the other one; right-click it for "Copy A to B" or "Copy B to A". Both are saved with your project, never in presets, and switching never clicks.

UNDO / REDO (the curved arrows left of the preset name). ⌘Z undoes and ⇧⌘Z redoes (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y on Windows); Undo and Redo also sit at the top of every right-click menu. A whole knob turn is one step, and so are a preset load, INIT, an A / B switch or copy, a RANDOMIZE roll and a MIDI MAP change. Up to 100 steps; the help bar names each one. Automation from your DAW is never undone.

SIZE (bottom right, beside the version). SMALL, MEDIUM, LARGE or EXTRA LARGE, or FIT TO SCREEN. You can also drag the bottom-right corner. The whole window scales as one picture, so nothing moves around. Your project remembers its size, and new windows open at the size you used last.

The preset menu: click the preset name. A dropdown opens under it: one sub-menu per category, then MY PRESETS (the ones you saved), then Init: a fresh start, Load a preset file… and Show my presets folder. Pick one and it loads at once (one undo step). ‹ and › beside the name step through every preset.

SAVE in the header opens SAVE PRESET: type a name and click the tags that fit. The first tag is the category it is listed under.

In the preset menu each factory preset is listed under its category (OBSERVATORY, NEBULAE, ABYSS and so on). Init: a fresh start sets every control back to its default for a clean start.

06How the sound flows

Your dry sound always passes through untouched. Everything below happens on a copy of it, the reverb path, which MIX then blends back in.

Violet: the parts that make DEEPFIELD move and sing. Your dry sound goes straight to MIX, untouched.

A few things follow from this order:

• LO CUT works twice: on the sound going into the reverb, and again on the tail coming out of the stack, so the engines' own low end goes too. RUMBLE comes after it, so it can still add depth underneath.
• PARTIALS and RUMBLE work on the whole stack. Whatever engines you choose, in either routing, the partials ring out of the combined tail, and RUMBLE adds depth under all of it.
• HI CUT comes after PARTIALS and RUMBLE, so it tames the top of everything you add.
• SPIRAL moves the finished tail, partials and rumble included, round the sphere.
• AUTO GAIN looks at the finished tail, so it keeps the level steady however much the modules above change it.
• INPUT comes first, so it changes how hard everything is driven, the dry sound included.
• PROCESS only changes what the reverb hears. Your dry sound always passes untouched.
• Nothing goes over −0.3 dB while LIMIT is lit (it is by default): a brick-wall limiter after MASTER catches every peak, with no added delay. RUMBLE and SPIRAL each guard their own headroom too.

07INPUT

Shapes the sound before it reaches the reverb. The dry sound you hear through MIX is never changed by these.

08STACK and the twelve engines

Two slots, each holding any of twelve reverb engines, or OFF. Changing an engine crossfades smoothly, so you can switch while the sound is playing.

The SPACE controls (SIZE, DECAY, MASS, DAMP, DIFFUSE, MOD, DRIFT) apply to both slots at once, and each engine reads them in its own way. MASS is the special one: it bends each engine in its own direction, as described below.

The engines

The smooth ones

The last three engines are made to be huge and graceful with nothing grainy in them: no grit, no metallic ring, no flutter. Every path of their networks has its own diffuser inside the loop, so the echoes melt together within a few milliseconds, and their movement is a handful of very slow sweeps. Reach for them when you want a space that is enormous but calm.

09SPACE

The shape of the space, for both slots at once.

The TAIL display

The TAIL display beside the knobs shows the reverb fading out, live, over the last six seconds, newest on the right. The filled shape is the reverb's level; the dashed line is how DECAY says it should fall (60 dB over the decay time), and the RT60 readout shows that time. The brighter the top edge, the more high end is left in the tail.

10GALACTIC SHIFT

Move between the two slots, by hand or on an orbit, so the space slowly turns from one world into another.

The bar under the GLOBE shows slot A on the left and slot B on the right, how far the orbit reaches, its SPEED in the middle, and where the morph is right now. In the GLOBE, slot A's particles glow in violet and slot B's in starlight, so you can watch one world fade into the other.

11SPIRAL and the GLOBE

SPIRAL sends the reverb travelling round a sphere around you: left and right, behind you, over the top and underneath. It works on speakers and comes fully alive on headphones.

DEEPFIELD places the sound the way your ears do: by level, by a tiny time difference between your ears, by your head shading the far ear, a duller sound behind you and a brighter, airier one above. On the SPIRAL path the cloud also drifts nearer and further away. SPIRAL never makes the sound peak louder than it went in.

The GLOBE

• You are in the middle, inside a wire sphere seen a little from above.
• The cloud of particles is the reverb tail itself. How many glow, and how brightly, follows its level.
• Two bright cores with trails are the left and right halves of the tail, leading the swirl.
• Every hit on the input sends rings out round the planet like Saturn's: tilted with the planet, a band of fine rings with a dark gap, the far half passing behind the globe and the near half sweeping in front.
• Colour shows the slots: violet for slot A, starlight for slot B. FREEZE holds the cloud where it is.

12PARTIALS

Bring the reverb to life. A set of tuned partials, from 4 to 32, rings out of the reverb tail itself, across both slots and every engine.

Each partial is a tuned resonance that the tail feeds. It only sings while there is reverb to feed it, so the partials rise and fall with your playing: a pad's tail turns into a shimmering chord, a drum room starts to ring like a bell, a vocal's space hums along in tune.

13RUMBLE

Depth and darkness under the space: a sub octave, a low growl like distant thunder, and a way to sink the whole tail.

Headroom

Deep sounds carry a lot of energy, so RUMBLE watches its own headroom. When the peaks get close to full scale, it turns down only what it adds (the sub, the growl and DARK's low lift), never the reverb itself, and brings it back up over a quarter of a second. While there is room, the depth comes through in full. You can turn everything up without it clipping.

14OUTPUT

The last stage of the reverb path, and the blend with your dry sound.

IN / OUT

The strip under the panels holds the controls that look after your whole signal.

15Modulation

CHIPS are Sequoia's exclusive drag-and-drop modulation. Drag any chip onto any parameter and it moves that parameter. No menus, no matrix to set up first.

Any knob can move on its own. The eleven chips along the bottom are the sources; drag one onto a knob and it moves it.

Making a routing

1. Drag a chip onto any knob. A coloured arc appears round the knob.
2. Drag the dots at the ends of the arc to set how far the source sweeps the knob. On a two-way source (LFO 1-3, RANDOM) each dot moves on its own: the upper dot sets how far it pushes up, the lower dot how far it pulls down. The knob and the other dot stay where they are, unless you pull a dot past the knob's pointer; then the knob follows the dot. On a one-way source (ENV, VELO, WHEEL, PRESS, KEY) the arc starts at the knob and you drag its far end; pulling the start dot toward the far end does nothing, and pulling it the other way, past the knob, brings the knob along. Alt-drag the knob to change both ends together.
3. Shift + right-click the knob to remove a routing, or to add one with Modulate with.

Sliders take chips too. Drop a chip on the MIX slider and the A H D S R sliders in the ENV window and a thin lane appears beside the slider in the source's colour, with a dot at each end: drag either dot to set how far it reaches that way, just like a knob's arc. While the source moves it, the slider's cap rides the live value and a small tick marks where you set it. Up to three per slider; an ENV can't move its own window's sliders.

Up to three per knob. Each knob takes up to three sources; drop a fourth chip and the help bar asks you to remove one first (Shift + right-click the knob). They stack in the order you added them, the first one closest to the knob, and their dots never sit on top of each other, so you can always grab the one you want. Where space is tight, a knob with two or three arcs draws its dial a little smaller to make room, and grows back when you remove them. Both dots of every arc can be automated from your DAW.

Even arcs. A two-way chip (LFO, RANDOM, KEY and bend where the plugin has them) swings both up and down, so when you drop one on a knob it gets the same room on both sides: the two end dots sit the same distance from the knob, even when the knob is not in the middle. If the knob is close to an end (within 10%), it can only move one way, so the arc keeps its full depth. One-way chips (ENV, macros, VELO, WHEEL and so on) are unchanged. Dropping the same chip on the same knob again evens it the same way. Projects and presets you saved earlier keep their arcs exactly as they were. To even out an arc later, Shift + right-click the knob and choose Mirror the two ends next to that chip: both ends become the average of the two, shrunk to fit around the knob, never below 10%.

One source can move many knobs: up to 16 routings in all. While the sources move, so does the knob: its pointer and lit spokes follow the modulation, all the arcs added together, and a small tick just inside the spokes marks where you set it. On each arc a dot rides along at that source's own speed, with a bright stretch from your setting to where the source is pushing the knob right now. Each source has its own shade of gray so you can tell them apart.

The knobs inside the ENV and LFO cards take chips too. Drop LFO 2 on LFO 1's RATE to make it speed up and slow down, or RANDOM on its MORPH for a wave that keeps changing. A card's own chip can't move its own knobs (LFO 1 can't move LFO 1's RATE); the help bar tells you if you try.

Click an ENV or LFO chip to open its card. While a card is open, every control that source moves lights up and the help bar lists them. Click any other chip and the help bar explains it.

The sources

The ENV card

The LFO card

What can be modulated

SIZE, DECAY, MASS, DAMP, DIFFUSE, MOD, DRIFT · MORPH, SPEED, REACH · SPIN, SPIRAL, HEIGHT · DRIVE, PRE-DELAY, LO CUT, HI CUT · LEVEL A, LEVEL B · WIDTH, MAKEUP, COMP, ECLIPSE, MIX · PARTIALS AMOUNT, PITCH, RING, SHIMMER, TILT · RUMBLE, SUB, DEPTH, DARK · INPUT · in the cards: LFO 1-3 RATE, SMOOTH, MORPH and RISE, ENV 1-3 VELO.

16MIDI MAP

Play the controls from your keyboard or controller: the mod wheel, aftertouch, a pedal or any knob or slider.

1. Click MIDI in the header. SOURCE starts on MOD WHEEL. Pick another from the menu, or click LEARN and move a knob on your controller.
2. + ADD a control from the list, or choose CUSTOM and just touch the knob, slider or button you want. Repeat to make one source move several controls at once.
3. Set each one's range with FROM and TO: where the control sits when the source is at zero, and where it goes at full. Put TO below FROM to make it go the other way.

Shortcut: Shift + right-click any knob and choose Map to MIDI. Mapped controls show a small tag: MW for mod wheel, AT for aftertouch, CC74 and so on.

17RANDOMIZE

Roll a brand-new sound in one click, and step back and forward through what you rolled.

RANDOMIZE never touches MASTER, MAKEUP, AUTO GAIN or FREEZE, never leaves you with silence, and never blasts. Your choice of amount and your locks are saved with your song.

18Presets

67 presets in 12 categories, each designed from scratch for DEEPFIELD.

Where presets live

Factory presets are built into DEEPFIELD; the folder holds the presets you save. (Copies of the factory presets that an older version installed in a Factory folder are moved into _old factory presets the first time this version runs, so they don't show twice; any you changed stay where they were.) A preset file (.deepfield) can be shared with anyone who has DEEPFIELD: they open it with Load a preset file… in the preset menu (click the preset name). A preset saved by an older version of DEEPFIELD loads with any newer controls at their defaults, so it always sounds the way it did.

19Recipes

Starting points for common jobs. Begin from INIT, then set these.

A vocal that stays clear

SLOT A CORONAL PLATE, SLOT B OFF · DECAY 1.8 s · PRE-DELAY 60 ms · LO CUT 200 Hz · ECLIPSE 40% · MIX 25%. The plate blooms in the gaps between phrases and gets out of the way while you sing.

Drums in a real room

SLOT A OBSERVATORY · SIZE 25% · DECAY 0.8 s · MASS −40% (up close) · DIFFUSE 50% · LO CUT 300 Hz · MIX 20%.

An endless ambient pad

SLOT A PROTOSTAR, SLOT B SINGULARITY, SERIES · DECAY 20 s · REACH 60% · SPEED 0.05 Hz · SPIRAL 40% · PARTIALS CHORD, AMOUNT 35%, RING 6 s · MIX 60%. Light FREEZE when the chord you want is ringing.

A singing tail in the song's key

Any engine · PARTIALS TYPE HARMONIC or CHORD, AMOUNT 50%, COUNT 12, RING 4 s, SHIMMER 40% · light MIDI PITCH and send the song's bass line or chord roots to DEEPFIELD as MIDI.

Distant thunder under a cinematic hit

SLOT B SINGULARITY, MASS +50% · DECAY 12 s · RUMBLE 80% · SUB 30% · DEPTH 45 Hz · ROLL 90% · DARK 40% · MIX 40%.

A space that moves round your head

SPIRAL 70% · PATH SPIRAL · SPIN 0.15 Hz · HEIGHT 70%. Then drag LFO 1 (SINE, 0.05 Hz) onto SPIN for a sweep that speeds up and slows down. On headphones it travels over the top and underneath.

Dub spring throws

SLOT A MAGNETAR, MASS +30% · DECAY 3 s · PRE-DELAY 250 ms · DRIVE 30%. Map the mod wheel to MIX (FROM 0%, TO 70%) in MIDI MAP and ride it for throws.

20Questions and answers

DEEPFIELD doesn't show up in my DAW.

Rescan plugins in your DAW's settings, then restart it. On macOS, make sure the download block was cleared (chapter 2). Look for it under Sequoia Synthesizers Co. If your DAW lists several formats, any of them works.

The reverb is too quiet, or too loud.

With AUTO GAIN on, the reverb follows your input's loudness, so set the balance with MIX. MAKEUP adds up to +24 dB on top. Turn AUTO GAIN off if you want the reverb's level to follow the settings instead.

The sound swells or ducks while I play.

That's ECLIPSE (it ducks while you play) or a negative MASS on SINGULARITY (the tail swells inward). Turn ECLIPSE down, or MASS up to zero.

The reverb won't stop.

FREEZE is lit, or DECAY is very long. Turn FREEZE off; the tail then fades at the DECAY time.

I don't hear SPIRAL much on my speakers.

SPIRAL places sound around your head, which speakers can only partly show. Turn SPIRAL above 50% and try headphones; you'll hear it travel behind, above and below you.

The partials don't sound in tune with my song.

Set PITCH to the song's key note (the display shows the note name), or light MIDI PITCH and send the song's notes to DEEPFIELD. NEBULA and GLASS are inharmonic on purpose.

Does DEEPFIELD add latency?

No. DEEPFIELD adds no latency, so it lines up in your mix and can be played live. That stays true with any OVERSAMPLE setting: the oversampler's small delay is taken out of the reverb's pre-delay instead, and LIMIT doesn't look ahead.

DEEPFIELD uses too much CPU on my computer.

Switch QUALITY to ECO (bottom right), set OVERSAMPLE to 2x or OFF, and keep PARTIALS COUNT low. Closing the plugin window also helps: the displays only work while you can see them.

Where are my MIDI mappings?

They're saved with your song, not in presets, so they're there whenever you open the song again, whatever preset is loaded.

21Specifications