Authoring instruments

Loading a preset shows you a finished sound. Building one teaches you the instrument. The New button on the bottom bar clears the patch back to a single unshaped oscillator, and the fastest way to learn Kiwisynth is to build one sound of each kind from that blank slate.

If the full editor feels like too much at first, Simple Mode is a gentler way to shape a sound, and anything you make there opens in the full editor so you can see how it was put together. The audition bar plays a short phrase that fits the sound type, a bass line for a bass, a slow chord for a pad, so you can shape a sound without playing the keyboard yourself.

The method every sound follows

A synthesizer builds sound in a chain, and every page in this section walks the same four steps in the same order.

1. Pick the raw tone. Choose an oscillator mode and a waveform. This is the material everything else shapes.
2. Shape its tone and its shape in time. The filter sets how bright or dark the tone is. The amp envelope sets how the note begins, holds and ends.
3. Add movement. LFOs, modulation envelopes, the Bloom sources and Breath keep the sound from standing still.
4. Polish with effects. Reverb, delay, chorus and saturation place the sound in a space and give it finish.

A bass and a pad use the same four steps. They differ only in what you reach for at each one, and that is what these pages explain.

The five starting points

Each page below builds one kind of instrument from scratch and explains the reason behind every choice.

• Bass. Low, solid and usually one note at a time. Start here if you want to understand how the filter and envelope give a sound its punch.
• Lead. The melody line that sits on top of a track, built for presence and expression.
• Pad. A slow, sustained bed of sound that evolves while you hold it. The page to read for movement and space.
• Pluck. A short, percussive note with a sharp attack and a quick decay, the opposite of a pad.
• Keys. Electric pianos, organs and bell-like sounds, played in chords.

Read them in any order. Bass is the most direct introduction to the filter and envelope, so it is a good first build.