CURVA User Manual

1. What is CURVA

CURVA turns any sound into a swerving shot across the stereo field — a football bending through the pitch. Two engines work together: MOVE sends your signal on a flight (pan, filter brightness and Doppler pitch all follow the ball's trajectory), and SAVE is the goalkeeper — a reactive deflection echo that parries the sound back into the field.

Shape the flight with the Spin and Loft knobs, or pick up the pencil and draw your own shot path straight onto the pitch. Fire flights on the clock (Move mode) or from your track's own transients (Kick mode). And when the number matters: at Mix = 0, CURVA is an exact, sample-accurate bypass.

CURVA is free, and runs as AU, VST3, AAX and Standalone on macOS (Universal, Apple-notarized), and VST3 and Standalone on Windows. It also happily takes a mono track and outputs stereo — more on that in Output & Global.

3. Toolbar — A/B, Copy, Undo & Presets

The strip along the top of the window is your technical area — substitutions, replays and the team sheet.

4. The Pitch

The stadium view is not decoration — the ball's flight is the sound. Horizontal position = pan, height = filter brightness, and the climb or dive of the path = Doppler pitch. Axis hints (PAN / BRIGHT–DARK / CLIMB = PITCH) appear on the field as a reminder.

AUTO vs DRAW (shot source)

AUTO (the default) — the trajectory comes from the Spin knob (banana curve) shaped vertically by Loft.

DRAW — pick up the pencil and freehand your own shot path on the pitch. The path is captured in draw order, so it may reverse, loop or cross itself — whatever you draw is what the sound flies. The stroke is lightly auto-smoothed. Click the trash button to clear and draw again.

Drawn curves are saved with your session and inside presets. Switching back to AUTO keeps your drawing in memory; DRAW re-activates it.

Direct manipulation on the field

• Drag the goalkeeper left/right to set Keeper Pos — where along the flight the SAVE echo bounces back.
• The player selector (‹ name › above the striker) switches the striker character; the keeper selector above the goalkeeper switches the SAVE character.

6. Trigger Modes — Move & Kick

Two ways to put the ball in play. Move runs on the clock; Kick listens to the audio itself.

Kick-mode controls

Kick Attack and Kick Release appear next to Sens whenever Kick mode is active.

7. MOVE — Flight Modulation

Open ADVANCED to reach the per-dimension depth controls in the MOD row. All of these are scaled by Power × Mix — think of Power as how hard the whole team is playing.

8. SAVE — The Goalkeeper Echo

The SAVE engine is an additive stereo deflection echo — it never gates or cuts the dry signal. The Save knob on the main deck sets the amount; the Advanced SAVE row shapes the echo itself.

Echo controls

The keeper roster

Switch keepers with the ‹ › selector above the goalkeeper. One echo engine, five characters — switching morphs smoothly (~30 ms) and never clicks:

Phantom-only controls

These two appear for the Phantom keeper and are ignored by the other four:

9. Players — Striker Characters

The ‹ name › selector above the striker loads a playing style into the Spin / Loft / Power knobs and flavours the Chaos randomness:

Selecting a character (except Manual) writes its Spin/Loft/Power style to the knobs — you can still adjust them freely afterwards.

10. Scenes & Coloration

The scene row changes the time of day on the pitch — and the sound follows the light: each scene selects the voicing of CURVA's analog-style coloration stage, driven by Power.

A Voicing override (Auto / Luminescent / Iridescent / Radiant / Luster / Dark Essence) unlinks the voicing from the scene — Auto means “follow the scene”, and any other choice pins that voicing regardless of the light. Some factory presets use this (e.g. Under the Lights and Phantom Cathedral pin the Iridescent voicing).

The coloration is loudness-matched, so switching scenes compares tone, not volume.

11. Output & Global

Mono → stereo

CURVA runs on a mono track and outputs stereo — drop it on a lone vocal, a bass or a single synth and it kicks the sound out into a wide stereo arc. Stereo tracks behave exactly as before.

12. Presets

The PRESET bar sits top right: ‹ › step through every patch in order; the name opens the browser.

The factory library holds 57 presets, grouped by category — hover a category and its patches fly out:

• Default Setting — resets to the factory default state.
• Save As… — names and saves the current state (including any drawn pencil curve) as a user preset.
• Export… / Import… — moves presets as files, for sharing or backup.

Presets that include a drawn path load with DRAW mode active — the curve appears on the pitch, ready to edit (unlock the pencil first) or clear.

Switching presets flushes the echo tail — no hot feedback ever carries over into the next patch.

13. Mix & Gain Staging

The plumbing, for the engineers. This is the part of the manual with no metaphors in it — almost.

• Mix is effect depth, not a parallel blend. CURVA runs a single serial path, so intermediate Mix values cannot comb-filter against a dry copy.
• Mix = 0 is an exact bypass — bit-transparent apart from the plugin's small fixed latency, which is reported to the host for automatic delay compensation. All other knobs can sit anywhere; at Mix 0 they do nothing.
• Power = 0 makes the flight silent-handed too: no movement depth, no drive.
• A final wet-gated safety limiter guards the output: whenever any wet path is active, it guarantees the output never spikes past ~0 dBFS — even at extreme Feedback, Save Level and Width settings. At Mix 0 it is out of the circuit entirely.
• The coloration stage is loudness-matched (RMS in vs. out), so Power and scene changes stay level-fair for A/B judgement.

14. Recipes

15. Troubleshooting