Kushview has released PulseDial, a DTMF synthesizer plugin that transforms classic telephone keypad tones into a playable musical instrument, and it’s currently free until Christmas.
PulseDial would be the perfect fit for the best weird plugins of 2025 article I wrote a few days ago. It’s definitely an odd instrument, but I kind of dig the idea.
The plugin delivers authentic Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency synthesis, the familiar tones (if you’re old enough) you’d hear when dialing numbers on a landline phone.
This, of course, doesn’t make much sense from the music production perspective. But after playing with PulseDial for a while this morning, I realized this one will be useful to have in my sound design toolkit. Instead of sampling a telephone when you need it, why not generate the actual sound in your DAW?
The interface is built around a classic 4×4 telephone keypad, which you can trigger with your mouse or via MIDI. Each key produces the correct dual-tone frequency pair, generated with impressive accuracy to meet ITU-T Q.23 specifications.
Whether this kind of accuracy is useful depends on what you’re using the plugin for (I mean, you could try using it as a temporary replacement if your landline phone’s keyboard dies, I guess), but it’s definitely fun to know that this indeed sounds like the real thing.
MIDI note mapping lets you perform the keypad tones from a keyboard, and you can even stack multiple keys at once for polyphonic dial tones (which give the term phone chord a whole new meaning).
The different tone modes (Hold, OneShot, and Spec) change how notes behave, from sustained synth-style tones to strictly timed telephone signaling.
The built-in arpeggiator is where things get fun. With multiple pattern slots, up to 16 steps, and play modes like Ping-Pong and Random, PulseDial can easily turn phone tones into rhythmic sequences and quirky melodic patterns.
There’s also a convincing phone line simulation using a bandpass filter that mimics the limited bandwidth of real telephone audio. You can add noise, saturation, bit depth reduction, and stereo width control to make the generated tones sound lo-fi.
If Kushview sounds familiar, that’s because we’ve covered several of their plugins before. Earlier this year, we looked at their one-knob compressors DuckDuck and Goose, as well as the Retuner tuning conversion plugin. And, of course, their biggest release to date is still Element, the free and open-source modular plugin host that we first covered back in 2019.
PulseDial is available now as a free download for a limited time (normally $20). It runs on macOS 10.13+ and Windows 10+, and comes in VST3, AU, AUv3, CLAP, LV2, and standalone formats.
Download: Kushview PulseDial (FREE until Christmas)
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Last Updated on December 22, 2025 by Tomislav Zlatic.
