The idea
Everything in Treehouse starts as a real, hand-played acoustic recording — no synthesis pretending to be organic, nothing built from scratch in a plugin. Then it’s left out in the open: granulated, drifted, ducked, dragged through a sweep, or built up into a slow collapse. The trailer says it plainer than any copy can — fog through the trees, wet wood, a structure half-swallowed by what’s grown back around it. That’s the instrument. Something was built here by hand. Something else has been living in it since.
Full Overview
Preset Playthrough
Real acoustic instruments. Unstable ground.
Eight acoustic voices — piano, choir, organ, sustained harpa, low bass, mallets, wood — sit at the centre of Treehouse, each one a genuine performance before anything else touches it. Every voice has a second self hiding behind it, one mod-wheel pull away. Nothing here stays played straight for long.
Demo Tracks
Three original pieces, composed entirely with Treehouse — nothing else in the mix.
Slow Burn
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Realisation
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Midnight Hour
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The Instruments
Percussion carries more weight than it first lets on. The Marimba, Tongue Drum, and Frame aren't just texture — they're what cuts through the drift, giving the textural underbelly something solid to hold onto.
Harpa (Sustained)
A held, sustaining voice rather than a struck one — it doesn't decay away, it just sits there, breathing, while everything else drifts underneath it.
Choir (Voice)
Two choirs occupying the same body — a Normal and an Altered layer, blended live off the mod wheel, each one mutable on its own. Push the blend and one version sings over the other.
Organ (Keys)
Same dual-layer principle as the choir — a Normal register and an Altered one, crossfaded in real time, never quite settling on either.
Piano (Keys)
A Normal and an Altered layer again, independently muted, blended by hand or by CC. The felt and the fault line, in the same instrument.
Bass (Low End)
Two full articulations — Long and Short — switchable per part, each with its own independently mutable layers underneath.
Marimba (Mallets)
Wood on wood, unprocessed at the source — everything strange happens downstream.
Tongue Drum (Mallets)
A single struck voice, the calmest thing in the instrument until it isn't.
Frame (Hits)
Percussive frame hits — texture as much as rhythm.
Textures
Four independent atmosphere layers, loaded from the same shared pool, each with its own reverb send, saturation send, and on/off switch. They don't wait their turn — Textures runs alongside whatever instrument is selected, always potentially live, blending under everything else on the pad.
Granulator
A granular engine built to actually survive being played. Load any audio file in and it grants two opposite states: Drift, a slow random walk across position and spread that never repeats the same shape twice, and Freeze, which holds one grain dead still. Rate and intensity shape how far Drift is allowed to wander.
The Blend Pad
The four-way heart of the instrument. One dot, dragged across a single square pad, blends Instruments, Textures, Granulator, and the FX Engine's return against each other on an equal-power curve — so the centre of the pad never goes quiet just because four things are sharing it. Switch on Motion and the balance stops waiting for you: a slow, independent wobble drifts the blend on its own, on both axes at once.
FX Engine
A shared gate-and-sweep processor, fed by whichever source you choose — Instrument, Textures, or Granulator — and blended back into the mix rather than replacing what it's drawn from. Two independent 16-step lanes drive the gate and the sweep separately, tempo-synced or running free, with sixteen filter algorithms sitting behind the sweep itself.
Riser / Downer
Hold the button and the instrument starts building toward something. Pitch climbs — or falls — by up to twelve semitones. The filter opens into rising resonance. Saturation grits up underneath. In the last stretch, the delay throws itself into feedback, and everything else in the mix ducks out of the way to let it through. Let go, and an impact lands on release. One press of Random Chaos rewrites the entire engine — oscillators, reverb, intensity, detune, all of it — in a single shot.
Treehouse was built by hand. It doesn't stay that way — the grain drifts, the fog gets in, and something older finishes what you started.
Where Treehouse Came From
"TREEHOUSE was written after I scored a film of the same name — about characters cut off from the world, trapped in the psychological pressure cooker the treehouse becomes. That story needed a wealth of real acoustic instruments, and the first one I had in mind was the organ, so I went back to St Michael's — the same church where we recorded Vestral Voices — and sampled it there. To those characters, the treehouse is a living, breathing thing: the root cause of everything they fear, and I couldn't think of a better wooden, breathing instrument than a literal organ. That's where the Altered layers came from too — it's just a treehouse, but the characters' perception of it is something far more warped and sinister than any rational thought would allow. I'd like to think this collection of instruments, recorded for the film score, gives you an exciting, experimental toolkit for your own scoring."
— James Cox, composer & founder
FAQ
What is Treehouse?
A hybrid acoustic instrument for cinematic scoring — eight real, hand-played instruments, four atmosphere layers, a granular engine, and a built-in tension system, all built from source recordings rather than synthesis.
What formats does Treehouse come in?
VST3 and AU, for macOS 11+ and Windows 10 or higher.
How big is the download?
About 1.2GB uncompressed — small enough to install in minutes.
How do I get my license after buying?
Every purchase includes a serial key, delivered instantly and downloadable through the Pulse downloader. It's also stored permanently in your Occult Audio account, so you can log in and recover it whenever you need to — no need to hunt through your inbox.
Is Treehouse a sample library or a plugin?
Both, in one — it's a self-contained instrument plugin (VST3/AU), not a Kontakt library or expansion pack. No separate player required.
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