Outboard PalmML — Press Kit

Outboard Audio has released Outboard PalmML, a hybrid guitar instrument for Windows and macOS in VST3, AU (macOS) and CLAP formats. Its sound source is a set of 400 embedded lossless recordings of a palm-muted multiscale seven-string: 20 chromatic notes from A1 to E3, two pickup positions, independent left/right takes and five round robins per note. In the default Original range, every note triggers its own recording — neighboring samples are never repitched, and notes outside the recorded range stay silent. An optional Extended range (A0–E5) plays notes beyond the 20 recorded ones from the recordings of the same pitch class, shifted by whole octaves, while the Liquid resonance always follows the played note.

The Liquid engine uses the real attack as an excitation for a note-locked dispersive string resonance with sympathetic overtones and a fixed cab voicing, restoring the fundamental the palm mute suppresses. A Tight–Ring axis moves the articulation from a roughly 95 ms staccato to a string resonance of about 2.4 seconds; a Whiten control attenuates the dominant low resonance in the excitation by up to 9 dB, and the wet energy is managed polyphonically to prevent build-up on chords and fast patterns.

The fixed downstream chain includes an eleven-band graphic EQ with 21 selectable curves, a Presence stage, a circuit-modeled diode overdrive with a fixed internal 96 kHz core, a stereo lamp/LDR vibe, a BBD-style chorus and a dark plate reverb — ended by a narrow anti-fizz notch and a softclip safety stage that stays bit-transparent below −1 dBFS.

Playback quality is selectable from 1× to 8× oversampling, with offline renders automatically using 8×; all resulting latency is reported to the host. Tuning supports Scala (.scl, with automatic .kbm mapping) and a live MTS-ESP master. 112 hand-tuned factory presets ship in 12 categories.

System requirements: Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit) or macOS 10.15 or later on Intel or Apple Silicon. The interface offers three fixed window sizes (840×630, 1020×765 and 1200×900) and uses the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Evergreen Runtime on Windows. All samples are embedded; there is no separate content download.

Outboard PalmML is available now at outboard.audio/outboard-palmml for €65, with a 14-day trial.