Authoring a lead

A lead carries the melody. It sits on top of a track, so it needs presence to cut through and expression to feel played rather than programmed. Where a bass is steady, a lead is alive.

Each control below gets a start value and a range to try, and each entry says what happens when you cross an edge. The ranges come from what the instrument is, not from a survey of our presets. See how to read these tables for what the provenance tags mean.

Voice

• Voice Mode (production convention). A melody is one line. Mono plus Glide is what makes it sound like one continuous performance rather than separate notes.
• Glide (production convention). Below about 0.03 s the slide is too quick to hear. Past 0.2 s the note arrives noticeably late, which is expressive on a slow line and unplayable on a fast one, so match it to the speed of the part.

Oscillator

• Osc1 Mode (production convention). A detuned saw stack is the default lead source; a wavetable gives a sharper, more distinct tone.
• Osc1 Unison (production convention). Enough copies to be wide. A lead has to stay a single identifiable pitch, so it takes fewer copies than a pad.
• Osc1 Detune (acoustic fact). The stack is wide but the pitch stays focused enough to play a melody in tune with the chords under it. Past about 25 ct the centre pitch smears, and a melody that is not clearly in tune stops being a melody.
• Osc1 Drift (acoustic fact). Each copy wanders slightly, the way an ensemble of real players never holds a perfectly fixed pitch. Past about 10 ct the wander reads as tuning instability rather than as life.
• Osc1 Width (production convention). A lead has no low end to collapse in mono, so it is one of the few sounds that can take full width.
• Sub Level (production convention). Enough to stop the lead feeling weightless. Past about 35% it competes with the bass for the low end, which is not its job.
• Warmth (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only pre-filter saturation. It glues the unison copies into one sound instead of several.
• Osc2 Semi (production convention). Unison with Osc 1 at the start value, which keeps the lead a single line. The interval worth knowing is +7, a fifth, which makes the lead sound like a chord in itself and suits a hook that plays alone. It is a real decision rather than a shade: a lead in fifths cannot be harmonised underneath without the two clashing, so pick it for a part that carries the section by itself. Octaves at plus or minus 12 thicken without committing the harmony.

The Osc 2 Semi row above is the one place in this section where the choice changes the arrangement rather than the tone. Read its entry before you move it.

Filter

• Filter Type (production convention). A low-pass with a resonant peak is the classic lead filter.
• Filter Cutoff, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (acoustic fact). A lead has to cut through a full arrangement, which means it needs energy in the 1 to 5 kHz band where the ear is most sensitive and where speech sits. Below about 1000 Hz it stops cutting through and becomes a pad. Past 8000 Hz it is bright but thin and competes with cymbals rather than with instruments.
• Filter Reso, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (production convention). The singing peak that gives a lead its character, and the highest resonance any instrument on these pages asks for. A lead can carry it because the melody keeps moving, so the peak never dwells on one partial long enough to whistle. Past about 50% it starts to anyway, and then the peak is the tune rather than the note.
• Filter Drive (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Adds bite ahead of the filter.

Amp envelope

• Attack (production convention). Fast enough that the note speaks when the key goes down. Past about 0.05 s a fast melodic line loses its articulation, because each note is still rising when the next arrives.
• Decay (production convention). With a high sustain the decay only shapes the first moment of the note.
• Sustain (acoustic fact). A lead must hold at strength while the key is down, the way a singer or a wind player holds a note. Below about 60% the note fades under the player, which is a pluck, not a lead.
• Release (production convention). Connects one note smoothly into the next. Past about 0.6 s the notes of a melody pile up on one another, which blurs a line in a way it does not blur a chord.

Movement

Movement over the note: back-loaded, still at the attack, growing while the note is held (acoustic fact).

A singer and a violinist both start a note straight and bring vibrato in once it has spoken, because the vibrato is an ornament on a pitch the listener has already been given. Vibrato present from the first instant reads as an effect on the instrument rather than as a player, and it also blurs the attack, which is where a lead states which note it is playing.

How to build it: LFO Delay 250 ms to 500 ms and Fade 300 ms to 800 ms, with the LFO in Per-Voice mode so each note gets its own delay. This costs no modulation envelope.

Expression is what separates a lead from a tone, and the most important addition is vibrato. Breath gives correlated vibrato, pitch drift and volume swell from one effort signal per note, which is closer to how a singer or a wind player plays than a plain LFO is.

• Vibrato Rate (acoustic fact). Human vibrato sits between 5 and 7 Hz, across singers and every orchestral instrument. Below about 4.5 Hz it sounds seasick; above about 7 Hz it sounds nervous. This is a fact about players, not about synths.
• Vibrato Depth (acoustic fact). A singer's vibrato swings roughly a tenth of a semitone. Past about 15 ct it stops reading as vibrato and starts reading as out of tune.
• Breath Depth (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only. Sets how much of the correlated effort signal (pitch, filter and volume together) reaches the sound.
• Velocity to Filter Cutoff (acoustic fact). Harder playing is brighter on any real instrument.
• Mod Wheel to Vibrato Depth (production convention). Vibrato brought in by hand on a held note is how a player shapes a lead in real time, and the mod wheel is where every keyboard player expects to find it. Route the wheel to the Breath vibrato depth rather than to a spare LFO: the depth row above then becomes the vibrato you always get, and the wheel adds to it, so pushing the wheel deepens a vibrato that is already there rather than switching a second one on. A lead with two independent vibratos running at slightly different rates sounds unwell rather than expressive.

There is one vibrato here, not two. Breath supplies it, the Vibrato Depth row sets how much of it you always get, and the mod wheel adds to that. Hold a note and push the wheel: the vibrato should deepen rather than appear. Routing the wheel to a second LFO instead gives a lead two vibratos at slightly different rates, which sounds unwell rather than expressive.

Effects

• Delay FB (production convention). A few audible repeats. Past about 50% the echoes outlast the phrase and clutter the next one.
• Delay Mix (production convention). Enough to give the line space without the echo competing with the note that made it.
• Delay Sync (production convention). Locked to the host tempo. An unsynced delay on a melodic line puts repeats wherever they happen to land, and on a lead they land between the notes you played and blur the rhythm of the phrase. This is the opposite of the texture page, where unsynced times are the whole point, and the difference is that a lead has a rhythm to protect.
• Delay Div (production convention). A dotted eighth, which is the standard choice and worth understanding rather than copying. Its repeats land three sixteenths after each note, so they fall off the straight grid and fill the gaps between the notes instead of doubling them. Choose a plain 1/8 or 1/16 and every echo lands on a beat you already played, which thickens the line rather than giving it space.
• Reverb Mix (production convention). A lead sits in front, so it takes far less reverb than a pad. Past about 30% it moves behind the track.
• Reverb PreDelay (acoustic fact). The ear fuses a reflection arriving within about 30 ms with the direct sound, so a pre-delay in this range leaves the attack dry and present while the tail sits behind it. This is the Haas window, and it is why the same reverb with no pre-delay softens the front of every note.
• Chorus Mix (production convention). Widens the stack.

A synced delay gives the line space without lengthening the notes, which is why the two delay rows above are the ones to set before you touch the reverb. A lead that needs more room almost always needs delay rather than more reverb: delay leaves the attack of every note dry and present, and reverb does not.

Variants

Build the base sound above, then apply the overrides below. Everything not listed stays as it was.

Supersaw lead

What the note is made of (timbre). Everything not listed below is unchanged from the base lead. A preset claims this band by declaring "timbre": "supersaw" in its tags; until it does, the base band still applies to it.

A wall of detuned saws rather than a single voice. This is a different instrument from the focused lead above, not a wider setting of it: there is no useful ground in between, because around 30 ct a lead is already too smeared to carry a melody cleanly and not yet wide enough to be a wall. Commit to one or the other.

• Osc1 Unison (production convention). The wall is made of copies.
• Osc1 Detune (production convention). Past about 35 ct the beating between the copies stops being a defect and becomes the timbre. The melody now reads as a texture that happens to have a pitch.
• Filter Reso (production convention). The singing peak a supersaw is known for.
• Warmth (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-specific, and high here: it glues the copies into one sound rather than several.

Plucked lead

How the note speaks (articulation). Everything not listed below is unchanged from the base lead. A preset claims this band by declaring "articulation": "plucked" in its tags; until it does, the base band still applies to it.

The same articulation as a plucked bass, on a melody instead of a bassline. The base lead holds its note under the player's finger; this one does not, and that single difference is what the ear hears. Every other lead setting still applies: it is the same instrument, played a different way.

• Sustain (acoustic fact). The base band floors sustain at 60% because below that the note fades out from under the player, and a lead must not do that. A plucked lead makes exactly that its point: the string is struck and drains away. There is no useful middle. Around 40 to 55% the note neither holds nor dies, and it reads as an amp envelope that was set carelessly.
• Decay (acoustic fact). With no sustain to hold the note, the decay is the entire length of it. Under about 0.1 s the melody is a row of ticks with no pitch; past about 0.5 s consecutive notes overlap and the line stops being playable.