The Lab

The Lab is MNodes' Synth & FX generator. Pick a patch type, choose a few flavour tags, press Generate, and MNodes builds a complete patch for you: a full effect chain, or a playable instrument with its own front panel and on-screen keyboard. It's the fastest way to get a sound out of MNodes, a great source of inspiration, and every result is a normal patch you can open up and edit.

Opening the Lab

Click the Lab icon in the left sidebar (the flask / beaker icon at the bottom).

Not seeing the sidebar? Toggle it with Ctrl/Cmd + Alt + E or go to View → Show Explorer.

How it works

1. Choose a Patch Type: FX Chain or Instrument.
2. Pick one or more flavour tags that describe the sound you're after.
3. Set Complexity (how much gets generated) and, under Front Panel, Creativity (how wild the generated panel looks).
4. Hit the Generate button (the magic wand).

Every press is a new roll of the dice: same settings, different result. Generation is a single undoable step, so Ctrl/Cmd + Z takes you right back.

FX Chains

With Patch Type set to FX Chain, the Lab builds a random chain of effect nodes matching your tags and wires it between Audio In and Audio Out.

Tag	What it adds
Tone	Filters and EQ-style colouring
Drive	Distortion, saturation, bitcrush
Motion	LFOs and modulated effects
Transform	Pitch shifting, frequency shifting, unusual processors
Space	Reverb, delay, spatial effects
Dynamics	Compression, limiting, expansion
Weird	Wildcard: adds unusual or experimental nodes

You can enable any combination. More tags = longer, more varied chains.

Every FX chain ends in a global Dry/Wet control, so you can blend the whole processed chain with your original signal without rewiring anything.

Instruments

With Patch Type set to Instrument, Generate builds a playable synth: a Poly Module with a complete voice inside (oscillators, filter, envelopes), wired to MIDI In, an on-screen keyboard, a couple of effects that match your tags, and a Volume control into Audio Out. Play it immediately from your MIDI controller or by clicking the keyboard.

Three options shape the result:

Option	Choices	What it does
Voicing	Auto / Poly / Mono	Polyphonic or monophonic. Mono instruments use a single voice with proper note priority, great for leads and basses.
Voices	Auto / 2 / 4 / 8 / 16	How many voices a polyphonic instrument gets.
Glide	Auto / Off / On	Portamento between notes. When present, the glide time gets its own knob on the panel.

Auto lets each Generate decide, which is where a lot of the variety comes from; the explicit settings pin the behaviour down.

In Instrument mode the tags read as flavours: Keys, Pad, Lead, Bass, Pluck and Weird. A selected flavour decides the character of the synth (envelope times, filter ranges, voice counts, effects); Weird pushes the sound design into stranger territory. Under the hood the Lab picks from six voice architectures (subtractive, supersaw, wavetable, FM, additive and plucked string), so even the same flavour keeps surprising you.

Here's what a generated instrument looks like in the graph:

Generate Front Panel

With Generate Front Panel enabled, every generation comes with a complete performance panel: organised sections for the oscillator, filter, envelopes and effects, output metering, and (for instruments) an interactive amp envelope editor plus a full-width keyboard strip at the bottom. Every control is already exposed to your DAW for automation.

The Theme (Night / Day) and Creativity controls decide how the panel looks; at high Creativity the layouts and colours get adventurous. Don't like the look? Regenerate Panel rebuilds the panel's style and layout without touching the sound: your knob values, the envelope and the keyboard all survive.

Tips

• Generate several results until one clicks, then tweak the nodes individually in the graph.
• A good result can be saved as a preset and reused later.
• If you love an FX chain, Group to Subgraph (Ctrl/Cmd + G) keeps it as a reusable effect block. Instruments already come packed in a Poly Module.
• By default the Lab starts a new patch on each Generate (the "Create new patch" toggle in the Build section). Turn it off to generate alongside what you already have.