Thicket (zc devices)
BPB (2026-10-07) on Thicket, a polyphonic node-based synthesizer plugin from a new, one-developer studio, zc devices (Meghan Holton), announced on KVR Audio 2026-10-05. A free open beta for Windows, macOS and Linux, VST3 and CLAP plus AU on macOS, running until November 8, 2026; not a permanent freeware release. The developer says the plugin took about two years to build in a bedroom studio.
What is in it
50 nodes, described as ready-made building blocks rather than bare modular primitives: a Sub Engine pairs a sound source with waveshaping and a sub-octave; Tape Echo is three tape heads plus a spring reverb. The set spans wavetable and sample playback (load your own, morph across up to five wavetables), granular processing, filters, distortion and modulation effects, wired freely in one visual editor — modular-routing again, this time built around a fixed polyphonic voice rather than a free-form rack. Effects can run per note or on the summed output in the same patch. Envelopes, LFOs, sequencers and followers can modulate each other, and MPE gives per-note pressure, slide and pitch as routable sources. Four macros are user-assignable; the plugin also builds its own macros from a patch, grouped under labels like Tone, Space and Drive.
Where it sits in the spoke
audionodes is the nearer comparison already here: also node-based, also free, also cross-platform. The difference is what the graph is for. AudioNodes' graph is open-ended and doubles as a DAW; Thicket's 50 nodes are purpose-built around one polyphonic instrument, and nothing here turns it into a timeline or a modular rack in the vcv-rack sense. Self-generating macros (grouping a patch's own parameters under a label) is a feature this spoke has not recorded on a node-based instrument before.
Provenance, stated plainly on the product's own page: zc devices publishes an AI charter saying the site and the synth were designed and built by people, with AI limited to tools like autocomplete. Unverified here; recorded because the developer volunteered it, not because anything was checked.
Tier and what's missing
T3 — a single blog's write-up of a beta announcement, one source, no independent test. No pricing after the beta, no CPU/RAM figures, no manual, no public repository; only installer sizes are given (Windows 144 MB, macOS 207 MB, Linux 178 MB). As a beta running a fixed five weeks, the whole page is a snapshot that may not describe what ships after November 8.
Related
audionodes · modular-routing · vcv-rack · bedroom-producers-blog · synthesis