Mad House Audio Launches ACID-O, Its Debut Plugin — A New Take on Acid Bass Synthesis

September 19, 2026 — Mad House Audio announced the launch of ACID-O, a TB-303-style acid bass synthesizer and the company's first commercial plugin release. Available now for macOS and Windows in VST3 and AU, ACID-O is built around a simple premise: acid bass should sound dangerous, not polite.

"Most digital takes on the acid sound end up too clean. We wanted something that actually growls — resonance that drifts and misbehaves the way real analog hardware does, not a filter that just sweeps a perfect sine wave. ACID-O is the plugin we wanted to use ourselves and couldn't find." - Mad House Audio

A Filter Built to Misbehave

At the core of ACID-O are two independent, parallel nonlinear filters, each of which every oscillator can be routed into — or bypassed entirely for a dry signal straight to the mix. Rather than modeling a filter that tracks modulation with digital precision, ACID-O's filter engine includes cutoff inertia, frequency-dependent resonance behavior, subtle pitch drift, and output-stage saturation, aimed squarely at recreating the instability and grit of the original analog circuits the genre was built on.

A Randomizer That Understands Music Theory

Where ACID-O breaks further from the pack is its randomizer. Rather than generating arbitrary note sequences, ACID-O's pattern generator is genre-aware — with five distinct profiles spanning Acid House, Tech House, Afro House, Techno, and Deep House — and key- and scale-aware, using weighted stepwise melodic motion and motif reuse to produce basslines that sound composed rather than scattered. When a second oscillator is detuned for extra thickness, ACID-O constrains it to musically coherent intervals — unison, octave, or a perfect fifth, and only when that fifth actually belongs to the current scale — so layered voices never clash.

Feature Highlights

Dual parallel nonlinear filters with independent per-oscillator routing
Two oscillators plus a dedicated sub, each with independent level, detune, phase, pan, and stereo-widening latency
Two LFOs and two envelopes with free drag-and-drop modulation routing and a custom breakpoint editor
A 64-step, 4-page sequencer with full per-step control over note, octave, gate, accent, slide, and tie
Genre-aware, key-and-scale-aware pattern randomization across five acid and house styles
Live, audio-reactive waveform displays on every oscillator and the master bus
A distressed, hardware-inspired interface with skeuomorphic knobs and sliders, scalable from 50% to 200%

Availability

ACID-O is available now at www.madhouseaudio.com, with the code MADHOUSE25 you can get off 25%. It runs on macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later and Windows 10 or later, in any VST3- or AU-compatible DAW, including Ableton Live, FL Studio, Logic Pro, Cubase, Reaper, Studio One, and Bitwig.

Soinc madness, engineered.

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