Outboard PalmML — Press Kit

Outboard Audio has released Outboard PalmML, a hybrid guitar instrument for Windows in VST3 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. Every note triggers its own recording — neighboring samples are never repitched, and notes outside the recorded range stay silent by design.

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). The interface is a fixed 1200×900 window using the Microsoft Edge WebView2 Evergreen Runtime. 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.