The Asylum - Boards of Audio

The Asylum Boards of Audio – Free Edition is a free virtual instrument built around damaged educational films, ageing tape machines, institutional documentaries and electronic music that feels as though it has been remembered incorrectly.

Boards of Canada are an obvious reference point-not because this instrument copies or samples them, but because their music demonstrated how de-tuning, tape damage and the strange emotional language of old educational media could become musical in their own right.

The Asylum Boards of Audio takes that atmosphere in its own direction. It is an original, independent instrument and has no affiliation with or endorsement from Boards of Canada. It contains no samples from their recordings.

Twenty records, one machine

The Free Edition contains 20 factory programmes spanning:

• Evolving pads.
• Dusty keys.
• Saturated basses.
• Breath-like woodwinds.
• Non-harmonic textures and field-like atmospheres.

The sounds are presented as a small internal ROM bank: choose a programme, play it, and shape it with eight immediate controls. There are no pages of modulation routing and no browser full of thousands of nearly identical presets.

Let the machine deteriorate

The clean sound is only the beginning.

Deterioration introduces unstable pitch, tape bias, saturation, bandwidth loss, dropouts and mechanical wear. Static / Vinyl adds crackle, hiss and low room tone. Isolation pushes the instrument into a large, distant and slightly unreal acoustic space.

Cutoff, resonance, attack and release provide the remaining shaping controls, with modulation-wheel vibrato available from a MIDI controller.

The result can move from warm, understated keys to unstable documentary pads, worn basses and sounds that seem to be leaking in from another room.

Free now. A larger machine is coming.

The Free Edition is intended to be simple and immediate: 20 sounds, one panel and no activation.

The forthcoming Complete Edition will expand the idea considerably, with two virtual analogue oscillators, an environmental field-recording layer, envelopes, LFOs, modulation routing, tape delay, VHS saturation, vintage digital conversion, BBD modulation, a driven filter bank, editable presets and user preset saving.

That larger machine is still being assembled. The Free Edition is ready to explore now.

The Asylum Boards of Audio – Free Edition

• Windows 64-bit: VST3.
• macOS 11+: VST3 and Audio Unit.
• Native support for Intel and Apple Silicon.
• Free for personal and commercial music production.
• No license activation.

If you want to process your own recordings through tape machines, cassette generations, damaged playback equipment and listening environments, take a look at our analogue tape emulator and processor Asylum Analogue.

The Asylum Boards of Audio is an independent Asylum Audio product. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Boards of Canada, and it contains no samples from their recordings.