Effects

The Effects tab holds the effects that colour and finish the sound. There are two groups: a distortion that works on each note on its own, and a rack of effects that work on the whole mix. The arpeggiator shares this tab and has its own page.

The effect display

Each effect shows a picture of what it does in the panel above its knobs. The picture updates as you turn a knob.

For the equaliser, auto-filter, multiband saturator and phaser the picture is a frequency view: low sounds on the left, high sounds on the right. A faint trace of the sound currently passing through plays behind the effect's own shape, so you can see what the effect is doing to what you hear. The phaser draws its row of notches here, and when the sweep is running you can watch the notches move across the picture.

The distortion shows its drive curve, the shape that turns the incoming sound into the driven one. The delay shows its echo pattern bouncing between left and right as it fades. The reverb shows its decay tail and the silent gap of pre-delay before it, with a faint live trace of the output behind, so a ringing note can be watched fading into the tail. The chorus shows its moving voices, the layers whose drift thickens the sound.

When an effect is bypassed its picture is dimmed.

Distortion

Distortion adds grit and harmonic richness by driving the sound until it clips. It runs on each voice separately, before the notes are mixed together.

Mode. Picks the kind of distortion:

• Soft Clip rounds the peaks for a warm, musical overdrive. This is the default and the gentlest option.
• Hard Clip flattens the peaks abruptly for a harder, more aggressive edge.
• Fold Back reflects the sound back on itself when it gets too loud, adding bright, metallic upper harmonics.
• Bit Crush lowers the resolution of the sound, like an old digital sampler. More drive means a coarser, grittier result.
• Decimate lowers the sampling rate by holding each sample for a while before reading the next, adding a bright, aliased digital crunch. More drive holds longer and crunches harder. Useful for the broken, lo-fi textures common in IDM and glitch styles.

Drive. How hard the sound is pushed. More drive means more grit. For Bit Crush and Decimate, drive sets how heavy the reduction is rather than how loud the sound gets.

Mix. Blends the distorted sound with the clean one. At full mix you hear only the distorted sound.

Bypass. Switches the distortion off.

Filter / Drive order. A toggle that decides whether the distortion runs before or after the filter. Drive into the filter for a tamed, smoother growl. Drive after the filter for a rawer, more present bite. Because distortion changes the harmonics, the two orders sound clearly different.

The effects rack

The rest of the effects work on the finished mix. They are shown as a stack of cards. Click a card to see its controls. Drag a card up or down to change the order the effects run in, which changes the sound: a delay feeding a reverb is not the same as a reverb feeding a delay.

Every effect has a bypass. An effect that is switched off, or turned fully down, costs nothing. To keep the stack readable when many effects are off, an inactive card collapses to a slim row showing just its name. It returns to its full size, with its value bar and summary, the moment it is switched on. Active effects always stand out from the ones doing nothing.

Hovering over a card shows a short description of what that effect does to the sound, so you can find the right one without opening each in turn. The small dot on the left of a card is its on/off switch: click it to bypass or enable the effect without changing which card's controls are shown.

Auto-Filter

A filter that sweeps on its own, for a moving, rhythmic tone.

Pos. The centre point of the sweep, from a darker to a brighter setting.

Rate. How fast the sweep moves. At its lowest setting the filter does not sweep, and Pos acts as a plain tone control.

Depth. How far the sweep travels.

Reso. Adds a sharp, vocal emphasis to the sweeping filter.

Mix. Blends the effect with the untreated sound.

Chorus

Chorus thickens and widens a sound by layering slightly delayed, slightly detuned copies of it.

Mode. Classic is a standard chorus. Ensemble is a richer setting whose copies move in a way that never quite repeats, recalling old string machines.

Rate. How fast the chorus movement is.

Depth. How strong the effect is.

Mix. Blends the effect with the untreated sound.

Delay

Delay repeats the sound as echoes. This is a stereo, ping-pong delay: the echoes bounce between left and right.

Left and Right. The echo time for each side. Setting them differently gives a more complex bouncing pattern.

Feedback. How much each echo feeds back to make the next one. More feedback means more repeats before they fade away.

Sync. When on, the echo time follows your project tempo instead of being set as a length of time.

Div. When Sync is on, this chooses the echo's musical length, such as a quarter note or an eighth note.

Stutter. Turns the delay into a beat-repeat. At zero it is a normal delay. Turned up, it grabs a slice of sound the length of the delay time and repeats it one, two, or three times on the beat, giving tempo-locked stutters and glitch fills. Turn Sync on so the slices line up with the beat.

Mix. Blends the echoes with the untreated sound.

Reverb

Reverb adds the sense of a space around the sound, from a small room to a vast hall.

Size. How large the space feels.

Long. Switches the reverb into long mode. The tail is stretched well past eight seconds for deep ambient washes and drones, where normal mode tops out at a few seconds. Leave it off for ordinary rooms and halls; turn it on, usually with a fair amount of Mix and a slow modulation on Size, for the kind of endless evolving space that sits under a pad. Combines naturally with shimmer.

Damp. How quickly the reverb's high frequencies fade. More damping gives a warmer, softer tail.

PreDelay. A short gap between the sound and the start of the reverb. A little pre-delay keeps the sound clear in front of the reverb.

Mix. How much reverb is added.

Shim. The shimmer amount. Turned down, the reverb behaves the same as it always did. Turned up, the reverb's own tail is lifted by an octave and fed back into itself, so the sound rises into a slowly-building cloud of higher notes. The classic cinematic-pad sound.

Pitch. How far the shimmer is pitched, in semitones. Twelve semitones up is the standard octave shimmer. Twenty-four pitches it up two octaves into something more bell-like. Negative settings pitch it down for a deeper, sub-octave wash.

ShDmp. Damping for the shimmer feedback path. Turned down, the pitch-shifted cloud rings on with everything still in it, eventually getting busy. Turned up, the higher partials of the cloud are tamed, so the shimmer stays close to the original note's pitch range. Turn it down for "wide-eyed swell", up for "warm halo".

Equaliser

The equaliser, EQ, lifts or trims three broad ranges of the sound.

Low, Mid and High. Each raises or lowers its part of the sound. Leave them at the centre for no change, above the centre for a boost, below it for a cut.

Multiband Saturator

This splits the sound into low, middle and high bands and adds drive to each one separately. It is a way to add energy, warmth or loudness with control over where it lands.

Lo Drive, Mid Drive, Hi Drive. The amount of drive in each band.

Lo Mix, Mid Mix, Hi Mix. How much of each driven band is blended back in.

Lo Xover and Hi Xover. The two frequencies where the sound is split into bands. Lo Xover divides low from middle, Hi Xover divides middle from high.

Mix. The overall blend of the effect against the untreated sound.

Volume Shaper

The Volume Shaper is a tempo-locked amplitude pump. It draws a single repeating curve, in time with the beat, and multiplies the sound by it. The most common shape is a sawtooth-down ramp: full volume on the downbeat, falling to silence just before the next one. Played against a kick drum, this is the "sidechain" pump that defines modern trance, house and tech-house — but produced inside the synth, without needing an external kick or a separate plugin.

The shape is editable. The default is the classic ducking ramp. Above the curve a row of buttons reads Free, 8, 16, 32, Reset. Free is freehand drawing — drag to paint the curve sample by sample. Pick 8, 16, or 32 to switch to a step grid: clicks paint whole rectangular steps at constant height, and dragging fills neighbouring steps at the same height. Reset wipes the curve back to the default ducking ramp.

The bipolar canvas runs from +1 at the top (open, no duck) to −1 at the bottom (closed, full duck). A square gate for trance-gate amplitude patterns, a soft breathing shape for movement on a pad, a fast double-pump for a 1/8 split duck — any of these can be drawn in.

Div. The musical length of one cycle: 1/4 follows the kick, 1/8 doubles the pump rate, 1/16 starts to sound like a gate. The longer 1/2, 1 Bar, and 2 Bars cycles let a step-drawn pattern span a whole phrase, which is how trance and EDM build-ups use the shaper — a fast-to-slow gate over one or two bars.

Phase. Slides the cycle within its grid position. Use it to nudge the duck slightly off the downbeat, or to offset against a host's own pumping.

Mix. How much the pump shapes the volume. At zero the effect does nothing. At one the shape replaces the volume entirely. Most modern records sit between 0.4 and 0.7.

Pos. Where the shaper sits in the post-mix effects chain. At the default (end of chain) the pump shapes everything, including the delay and reverb tails — gives the wet "pumping reverb" sound. Move it to the front of the chain for a cleaner pump that doesn't smear the time-based effects.

Bypass. Switches the effect off. The shaper ships bypassed by default so loading an older preset doesn't suddenly start pumping.

Tape

Tape adds the character of an analog tape machine to the whole mix: saturation that softens loud sounds, a top-end roll-off that takes the edge off, and small pitch wobble from the transport. It is what turns a clean digital sound into one that feels recorded.

The tape stage is not the same effect as the multiband saturator. The saturator splits the sound into bands and pushes them through a hard curve for loudness or grit. Tape works on the whole mix and adds soft, asymmetric saturation framed by a gentle high-frequency lift before it and a matching roll-off after it, so loud sounds soften and quiet sounds stay clean. The pitch wobble has no equivalent elsewhere in Kiwisynth.

Drive. How hard the tape is pushed. Turned down, the saturation is subtle and the tape mostly adds warmth. Turned up, the saturation softens peaks and adds richness, eventually compressing the sound noticeably.

Tone. A high-frequency taper. Turned down, the top of the sound is left alone. Turned up, the highs are rolled off, for an older, darker tape.

Wow. Slow pitch drift, the kind a worn capstan adds. Turned up, held notes wander slightly in pitch over time. A little goes a long way on pads and held chords.

Flutter. Faster pitch wobble, the kind a small head defect adds. Turned up, the sound takes on a noticeable wobble. Useful as an effect more than a character, especially on plucked or sustained tones.

Bias. Asymmetry in the saturation. Turned down, the tape distorts evenly. Turned up, even-numbered harmonics are added, the warmth that draws people to tape in the first place.

Mix. The blend of the tape character against the untreated sound. At the default it is fully wet so the bypass toggle is the simplest way to switch the effect on and off.

Pos. Where Tape sits in the post-mix effects chain. The default is the end of the chain, where Tape colours the reverb and delay tails along with the rest of the sound. Move it earlier in the chain if you want the time-based effects to stay clean.

Bypass. Switches the effect off. Tape ships bypassed by default so loading an older preset doesn't suddenly start saturating.

Phaser

The phaser carves a row of moving notches out of the sound. As the notches sweep up and down they create the swirling, underwater motion that defines the effect, from gentle movement on a pad to a deep, vocal-like whoosh on a lead. The display draws the notches so you can see them move as you turn the knobs.

The phaser is not the same as the chorus or the flanger. The chorus thickens a sound by stacking slightly detuned copies of it. The phaser leaves the pitch alone and instead cancels narrow bands of frequencies; the notches it makes are spread unevenly across the sound rather than in the even comb a flanger produces, which is what gives the phaser its softer, more vocal character.

Rate. How fast the notches sweep. Turned all the way down to zero the sweep stops, so you can park the notches at one spot or move them yourself from the modulation matrix (for example, letting a held note slowly open the phaser as it ages).

Depth. How far the notches travel. Turned down, they barely move. Turned up, they sweep across most of the sound.

Center. The frequency the sweep is centred on. This is also the natural target for the modulation matrix when you want to move the notches by hand.

Feedback. Resonance around the notches. Turned up, the notches get sharper and the peaks between them ring, for a stronger, more obvious effect. It can be set either side of centre for two different notch shapes.

Stages. How many notches the phaser makes (one notch for every two stages). Fewer stages give a simple, classic sweep; more give a thicker, denser, more vocal sound.

Spread. Stereo width. Turned up, the left and right notches sweep in opposite directions so the effect widens across the stereo image.

Mode. Classic uses a steady sweep. Organic drifts the sweep so it never quite repeats, the way an analog phaser pedal wanders, for a more alive feel on long pads.

Sync. Locks the sweep rate to the host tempo using the division control next to it, so the movement lines up with the beat.

Mix. The blend of the phased sound against the untreated sound. The notches are deepest at the halfway point, which is the default.

Pos. Where the phaser sits in the post-mix effects chain. The default is the end of the chain.

Bypass. Switches the effect off. The phaser ships bypassed by default so loading an older preset doesn't suddenly start sweeping.