Description
HARSH was not the first VST3 I made using Cycling '74's RNBO to JUCE/CMake workflow, but it was the first one that felt like a real plugin rather than a successful export. My earlier builds used the basic JUCE sliders generated by the template; HARSH was the first project where I built a custom interface around the instrument.
It was also my first RNBO-based VST3 to use genexpr~ as the core of the sound engine. Rather than building an effect that processes incoming audio, I made HARSH as a self-contained harsh noise generator.
The sound begins with a drifting oscillator pushed through feedback, low-pass tone shaping, and tanh saturation. That signal then runs into a second distortion stage with low/sub emphasis, resonant bump filtering, dry/wet mixing, and another layer of drive.
Fourteen RNBO parameters were exposed to control the instrument, covering noise modulation, drift amount and time, drive, feedback, tone, output gain, master volume, and the second distortion section. The naming is not especially elegant, but it reflects the exploratory state of the patch: the plugin grew out of testing, listening, renaming later than I should have, and keeping the controls that made the noise feel alive.
The interface was a major part of the milestone. With Codex helping on the JUCE/C++ side, I built a black, red, and white burst background, a distressed HARSH logo, custom vertical faders for the noise section, and rotary controls for the distortion section. The UI is probably a bit harsh in itself, but that suited the instrument, and it was the first plugin interface I made that felt recognisably mine.
After the plugin received some attention on Reddit's /r/noise, I decided it was worth polishing properly and releasing for free. As a project, HARSH helped prove that the RNBO export workflow could become more than a quick bridge from Max to VST3: it could be the basis for strange, personal instruments with their own visual identity.