TOUCHSTONE
Your voice. Held steady.
An engineer's hand on your fader. It reacts in a thousandth of a second. It never gets tired. It does what it says — and you can check.
New to this? Thirty seconds.
A compressor is a robot hand on a volume fader. Loud moment? Pulled down. Instantly. Then it lets go.
Four knobs. Four questions.
| How loud is "too loud"? | Grab Point |
| How hard does it pull? | Strength |
| How fast does it grab? | Reaction |
| How fast does it let go? | Recovery |
One rule worth knowing: a compressor never makes anything louder. It only turns down — the loud comes from you, after. That rule is true of every compressor ever built.
One thing in this box breaks it.
Voice mode. The hand that also lifts.
Quiet phrases rise. Loud ones get caught. Your voice sits exactly where you put it — like an engineer riding the fader, both directions, all night.
It hears effort, not just volume. Pushed singing sounds pushed even when it isn't loud. Turn up Intimacy and a pushed take comes back close — like singing in someone's ear, at full level. Or turn it the other way, and a timid take leans forward.
Lean in. Back off. The mic never notices. Close mics boom when you get close. Touchstone hears the swell, knows what it means, and rides it out. Tell it once what mic you're on — on a close dynamic, a bass swell is probably you; on a faraway condenser, it's probably the song. That's the whole switch. It doesn't imitate microphones. It just knows yours.
It learns your voice. Then it remembers. A few seconds of singing and it knows your baseline. Freeze it, and it saves with your session — same behavior, every pass, every time you reopen the project.
Five classics. No mythology.
CLEAN
Nothing extra. Mathematically exact, flat to ±0.05 dB, zero latency.
FET
The grab. 1176-style feedback, attacks down to 20 microseconds.
OPTO
The glue. LA-2A-style optical cell with the two-stage release.
VARI-MU
The lean. Fairchild-style — it holds on harder the more you push.
VCA
The punch. dbx/SSL-style RMS detection, literal controls.
VOICE
Nothing like it. See above.
Tested. Then shipped. Not the other way around.
186 checks run before every release. They ship with the source code. Run them yourself.
| The promise | The number |
|---|---|
| Doesn't change your tone | flat ±0.05 dB to 20 kHz, any mode |
| Doesn't delay your signal | 0 samples. Exactly. (43 with HQ, reported honestly) |
| Doesn't add digital grit | aliasing ≤ −97 dBc under 25 dB of compression |
| The fast engine matches the reference | residual ≤ −137 dBFS |
| Voice mode follows its own law | within 0.5 dB, measured on real singing |
| Doesn't eat your computer | 328x realtime — about 0.4% of one core |
| Off means off | bit-exact passthrough |
Install
The easy way. Paste this in Terminal. It downloads and installs both plugin formats — no admin password, no security warnings.
/bin/sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://github.com/loganjamesbailey/TOUCHSTONE-LA-8/raw/main/scripts/install.sh)"
The manual way.
- Download and unzip.
- Copy
Touchstone.componentto~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/ - Copy
Touchstone.vst3to~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/ - Restart your DAW. In Logic Pro: Audio Units > JamesBailey > Touchstone.
Manual downloads may trigger a macOS warning that the developer can't be verified — that's because this release isn't notarized with Apple yet, not because anything is wrong with it. Approve it under System Settings > Privacy & Security > "Open Anyway", or use the Terminal install above, which avoids the warning entirely. You can also build from source; everything you need is in the repository.