Bouncing Cats

Bouncing Cats (VST3, CLAP, AUv2)

Bouncing Cats is a MIDI delay effect that turns every played note into a bouncing phrase: each land on the keyboard fires a delayed MIDI echo, while a cat head hops across an 88-key piano so you can see timing, pitch, and decay as they happen.

Instead of a hidden delay buffer, Bouncing Cats makes the echo chain readable. Hold a note and a bounce phrase is born; each subsequent land sends another MIDI note at the scheduled rate, with velocity fading by Fade Out and pitch climbing through Octave stacks when you want staircases, cascades, or octave showers. Rate can lock to host tempo with sync divisions from 1/16 through 1/1 (including dotted values), or switch to Free mode for 40–1000 ms spacing. Curve warps the whole phrase inside the same total span — positive values cluster late hits (bounce acceleration), negative values front-load the chain — while Human adds up to 100 ms of per-tap timing looseness without breaking order.

Up to 32 bounce voices can run at once, each freezing its parameters at note-on so poly lines stay independent. Notes sets how many delay taps follow the original (up to 63), Dur shapes gate length on the echoed notes, and Octave Random reshuffles the round-robin octave path so successive taps avoid simple linear climbs. Trigger Mode chooses Gate (echoes die with the source note-off) or OneShot (the full bounce phrase runs free). Params Mode switches Global shared settings for every note, or Poly so each MIDI pitch can carry its own Rate, Notes, Fade Out, Curve, Octave, Dur, and Human profile — pick a key on the on-screen A0–C8 keyboard to edit that slot.

The interface is built for performance feedback: color-coded hop arcs, impact flashes, piano key glow, optional tip-link chains between active cats, a preset browser with 30 starting points from Classic Quarter Echo and Slapback Eighth to Cascading Octaves, Ghost Taps, and Sustained Shimmer, plus a header dice button to randomize the active parameter set for fast discovery.

Use it for MIDI slapback and dotted-eighth echoes, octave staircases and pitch-climbing delay figures, ghost-velocity taps, poly per-key echo profiles, generative bounce phrases that would be slow to draw note by note, and any workflow where you want delay behavior as MIDI rather than as an audio buffer.

Beta Offer:

A limited beta-period discount is currently available.

Highlights:

- MIDI note delay with up to 63 delay taps after the original and up to 32 simultaneous bounce voices

- Host-sync rate divisions (1/16 through 1/1, including dotted) or Free rate from 40–1000 ms

- Fade Out velocity decay, Dur gate length, Curve timing warp, and Human per-tap looseness

- Octave span 0–4 with round-robin pitch climbing and Octave Random shuffle order

- Gate or OneShot trigger modes; Global or Poly parameter mode with per-note profiles

- Visual bounce stage with cat heads, hop arcs, impact flashes, piano keyboard, and tip-link chains

- 30 preset states plus header dice randomization for fast experimentation

Formats:

VST3 / CLAP / AUv2

Compatibility:

macOS 14 or later

Windows 11 or later

For problems, questions, or feature requests:

leestrument@gmail.com