Authoring instruments

Loading a preset shows you a finished sound. Building one teaches you the instrument. New, in the Menu button in the top left corner, 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 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.

How to read the tables

Every control on these pages gets a start value and a range to try.

The start is an anchor. Set it, play the sound, and you have a working instrument of that kind. It is a place to begin, not a recommendation.

The range is the band in which the sound still reads as that instrument. Its edges are not the limits of the knob, and they are not the limits of taste. They are the points where the thing you are building turns into something else: a bass whose cutoff drops far enough becomes pure sub, and one whose cutoff rises far enough becomes a mid-range synth. Each entry says which. That is the part worth reading, because a number you cannot explain is a number to copy rather than a control you have learned.

Every entry carries a tag saying where its band comes from, and they do not deserve equal trust:

• An acoustic fact is true of any instrument in any synthesizer. A bass fundamental at C2 is 65 Hz. Human vibrato sits between 5 and 7 Hz. A struck string loses its brightness as it rings. These do not depend on Kiwisynth and they will serve you in any other synth you open.
• A production convention is how records are actually made. A bass is kept mono because club systems sum the low end. This is a norm rather than a law, and norms are made to be broken once you know why they exist.
• A control marked Kiwisynth-specific has no equivalent outside this synth, so no outside knowledge can tell you where its edges are. Warmth, Note Bloom Rate and the unison Curve are ours. Their bands are our judgment, and they are the weakest claims on the page. Trust your ears over them.

Go outside a range on purpose. The edges tell you what you give up, not what you are forbidden. Most interesting sounds are somewhere a table did not send you.

The starting points

Each page below builds one kind of instrument from scratch and explains the reason behind every choice. There is one for every category in the preset browser.

• 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. It also carries the four metallic timbres, which are the page to read for inharmonic sound of any kind, not only in the bass register.
• 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. It also covers struck sounds, which share the articulation and change only the material.
• Keys. Electric pianos, organs and bell-like sounds, played in chords. The page for FM.
• Texture. An evolving background that is more atmosphere than note, the page that leans hardest on motion and effects.
• FX. Risers, impacts and sweeps. Not a note you play but a gesture you place, and the one page whose bands are wide on purpose.

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

Every page ends with variants: a reese rather than a tight bass, a bell or an organ rather than an electric piano. A variant is a different instrument that happens to share a page, not a wider setting of the same one. Build the base sound, then apply the variant's overrides.

Variants come in two kinds and one of each can apply at the same time. A timbre says what the note is made of; an articulation says how it speaks. Struck metal with a plucked articulation dies while you hold the key, and the same struck metal on the base envelope rings on. Picking one of each is normal, and picking two of the same kind is not, because a note is made of one material.

Styles

Three more pages build a recognisable style rather than a category. Each is a complete build in its own right, from the same blank patch, and none assumes you have read a page here first:

• Retro wave. The detuned analog brass and chorus sound of 1980s synth pop.
• Trance. The wide, sustaining supersaw anthem.
• Rave stab. The short, dirty chord hit of early 1990s rave, and the harmony layer that follows the key.

When you want a technique rather than a whole instrument, three more guides cut across the categories and carry no range tables of their own:

• Adding motion. Keeping a patch from standing still.
• Layering. Building a fuller sound from the three oscillators.
• Effects for character. Using the effects as part of the instrument rather than as polish on top of it.