Built-in processors

Stagewright ships with a set of always-available "Stagewright" plugins, written natively in the engine so they don't depend on any third-party plugin being installed. They come in three families:

• Utilities every rig wants: mixers, meters, tuner, metronome, signal generator, boolean control.
• Effects (since 1.12): Gate, Compressor, Reverb, Guitar Amp, Bass Amp.
• Instruments (since 1.12): Keys and Drum Kit, so a MIDI keyboard or e-drum kit makes sound on a fresh install.

The effects and instruments are deliberately lightweight: honest, CPU-cheap starters that get a new rig making sound in minutes. They are not meant to replace professional third-party plugins — when you load your favourite channel strip or piano library, they step aside gracefully (every wizard-built chain is an ordinary rack you can rewire).

All built-ins appear in the plugin picker under the vendor Stagewright (which sorts to the top of the list), each with its own icon. Effects and instruments render as hardware on the canvas card — knobs, grille cloth, rack plates — and their controls are live on the card itself: drag a knob directly, no editor window needed. Double-click a knob to reset it to its default.

Channel Mixer (1 / 2 / 4 / 8 / 16 channels)

The Stagewright-native console strip. Pick the channel count at load time (Channel Mixer 1ch, 2ch, 4ch, 8ch, 16ch, distinct entries in the picker). The 1ch variant is a single-strip utility, gain / EQ / pan / mute / solo with a peak meter, handy for trimming a single source without dropping in a multi-strip mixer. Each strip has:

• Input gain (preamp trim, with double-click reset to unity).
• EQ (bass / treble shelves, engage / bypass).
• Fader (post-EQ).
• Pan (mono → equal-power pan; stereo → balance).
• Mute / Solo with engine-side solo-overrides-mute logic.
• Output bus select (per-strip routing to any of the mixer's outputs).
• Mono / stereo toggle per strip (mono pairs auto-collapse).

Peaks are measured post-fader / post-pan / post-EQ so the on-card bargraph + any bound front-panel meter agree with what's actually leaving the strip.

User-typed per-strip labels (set in the node inspector) flow into the strip headers AND into the front-panel inspector's parameter / peak pickers, "CH 1 Treble" becomes "Piano Treble" once strip 1 is labelled.

True-Peak Meter

Broadcast-quality peak readout with 4× oversampling. Use as the master-bus meter to verify you're not clipping at the rendered sample rate. Pair with the front-panel SwBargraph or SwVuMeter for a stage-readable display.

Signal Generator

Sine / square / saw / noise generator with frequency + level controls. Useful for:

• Testing wires (does a 440 Hz tone reach the output?).
• Verifying plugin behaviour at a known frequency.
• Pink noise calibration.

Bind the front-panel SwToggle to its enabled parameter for a quick on / off from the performance surface.

Tuner

Fundamental-frequency detector. Reads the bound input, reports the nearest note + cents-off + raw Hz. The on-card UI shows a big note glyph + a cents needle bar; pair with a 1U SwTuner front-panel widget for performance-distance use. Lives read-only (no bound plugin parameter to write, it's pure measurement).

Metronome

Synthesised click on every beat (with optional accent on beat 1). Parameters: BPM, beats-per-bar, accent toggle, output level. The metronome streams its beat + pulse + isRunning state to the frontend so a bound SwMetronome widget can mirror it 1U-sized on the front panel. Tap-tempo button on the card.

VU Meter

Analog-style level needle. Slower attack / release than the True- Peak meter; reads what an analog console would read. Use as an "in-the-mix" reference, not for clip detection.

Boolean Control

Single big On / Off button. Its output port can drive any plugin's bypass-in port directly, wire it to N plugins to make one boolean flip the bypass of all of them at once. Surface the button on the front panel by binding a SwToggle to its bypass parameter.

(In v1 the front-panel plugin-bypass binding kind covers the single-plugin-bypass case directly. Boolean Control is still useful for ganged bypass across multiple plugins.)

Gate

Noise gate, first in line on a vocal or drum-mic chain: silence between phrases stays silent instead of feeding bleed and hum into the compressor and reverb behind it.

• Threshold (dB), level below which the gate closes.
• Range (dB), how far the closed gate attenuates (full mute at the bottom of the range; a few dB for gentle "ducking" instead of hard gating).
• Attack (ms), how fast the gate opens when signal returns. Keep short for vocals so consonants aren't clipped.
• Release (ms), how fast it closes after the signal drops.
• Hold (ms), minimum open time once triggered, prevents chattering on sustained-but-wavering material.

Compressor

Program compressor with make-up gain, the workhorse in the vocal and bass chains the setup wizard builds.

• Threshold (dB), level where gain reduction starts.
• Ratio, amount of reduction above threshold (2:1 gentle, 8:1 and up approaches limiting).
• Attack (ms), how fast reduction engages. Slower attack lets transients punch through.
• Release (ms), how fast it lets go.
• Make-up (dB), output gain to bring the compressed signal back up.

Reverb

Stereo room reverb for placing a dry source in a space.

• Room, size of the simulated space.
• Damping, high-frequency absorption (higher = darker tail).
• Wet / Dry, independent levels for the effect and the direct signal. In an insert chain keep dry high and add wet to taste; as a shared send effect set dry to zero.
• Width, stereo spread of the tail.

Guitar Amp & Bass Amp

Amp simulations with the classic head-plus-cab control set. Same control layout, different voicings: the Guitar Amp is voiced for mid-forward crunch, the Bass Amp for low-end weight and a deeper cabinet. On the canvas they look the part — chicken-head knobs, grille cloth, and yes, the guitar head is shorter than the bass cab.

• Drive, input gain into the clipping stage.
• Bass / Treble, tone stack around the drive.
• Level, post-everything output volume.
• Cab, cabinet-simulation amount, back it off for a more direct DI-style sound.

Keys (instrument)

16-voice FM electric piano, the guaranteed sound source for a MIDI keyboard on an install with no third-party instruments. Two voices, switchable on the card:

• E-Piano, the classic tine bite.
• Piano, an octave-modulator voicing with a softer attack and longer body, reads as an acoustic-leaning piano in a band mix.

Controls: Volume, Brightness (FM index / bite), Decay and Release (seconds), Spread (stereo voice spread). Wire a MIDI Input node's MIDI port to the Keys card's MIDI port and its audio outs onwards like any plugin.

Drum Kit (instrument)

Synthesised drum kit on the General MIDI map: kick on 36, snares 38/40, closed / pedal / open hats on 42/44/46 (open and closed share a choke group, closing the hat cuts the open tail), toms 41-50, crashes 49/57, ride 51. Two kits, switchable on the card:

• Electronic, 808-flavoured pitched bodies with pitch drop.
• Acoustic, the same voices re-dressed: lower start pitches, shorter bodies, more skin noise.

Controls: Volume, Tune (global pitch trim), Punch (transient emphasis), Decay (global body length), Tone (brightness of the noise layers).

Parameter order is stable

Every built-in's parameter order is frozen across releases, so front-panel bindings and song overlays that address parameters by index keep working after updates. New parameters (like the Keys voice and Drum Kit kit selectors) are only ever appended.

MIDI Monitor (legacy)

Pre-v1 there was an addable back-canvas MIDI Monitor card. It's been replaced by the panel-based Diagnostics → MIDI Monitor tab which reads engine-wide MIDI traffic per device, no card needed. Existing projects with a MidiMonitor card still load (the processor stays compiled in for back-compat); no new ones can be added.