Afterhours: the techno and house VST that plays the groove

A techno and house VST that plays the whole groove

Afterhours is an instrument for deep house, tech house, melodic house and techno. Hold one chord and four parts play in time with your track: a hypnotic lead sequence, a rolling bassline, chord stabs and an ethereal atmosphere. It's the sound of the modern club, from late-night deep house to big-room melodic techno, in one window.

Most producers build that sound from five plugins and a lot of automation: an arpeggiator, a mono synth, a bass, a stab sampler, a pad, a sidechain plugin and a filter sweep for every build. Afterhours does it as one instrument, so you spend your time on the idea and the arrangement.

Evolve: a sequence that never plays the same bar twice

Melodic techno lives on lines that slowly change for minutes: the filter breathes, accents move, notes drop out and come back an octave up. In other synths that's an hour of automation lanes. In Afterhours it's one knob. Evolve mutates the line over 8, 16 or 32 bars, drifting the filter, accents, note probability, octave jumps and ratchets. It follows your song position, so the same bar always sounds the same when you play the track back, and Freeze holds the line exactly where you like it.

Build and Drop on one fader

Push Build up over eight or sixteen bars and Afterhours does what a producer automates by hand: the filters open, the reverb washes out, a noise riser climbs, the pump deepens, the lead ratchets faster and the bass thins out. Let it fall and the drop hits with everything snapped back open. It's a normal automatable parameter, so one lane in your DAW draws the whole move, and your MIDI keyboard's mod wheel performs it live.

Five styles, sound and groove together

The Style tiles change the patterns, swing, bass mode, stab rhythm and tones at once. Every part can still be overridden: pick a bass mode, a stab rhythm or a lead wave yourself in Full edit.

Four roles, each a proper synth

• Lead: a mono analog-style voice (saw, square, pulse or saw plus sub) through a resonant 24 dB ladder filter with its own envelope, drive and glide, played by a step sequencer with accents, slides, ratchets and octave jumps.
• Bass: follows the root of your chord in Rolling 16ths, Offbeat, Long sub or Pulse 8ths mode, with tone and decay controls and the built-in pump.
• Stab: organ, pluck or full-chord stabs voiced from the notes you hold, in Offbeats, Push, Syncopated, Bar or Off-16ths rhythms.
• Air: an ethereal pad of detuned voices through a slow shimmer, with motion and a long reverb for the melodic, emotional end of the sound.

Afterhours vs building it from separate plugins