Authoring a texture

A texture is more atmosphere than note: a shifting background, a drone, a bed of sound that sets a mood rather than carrying a melody or a chord. Where a pad is still a chord you play, a texture is something you start and let evolve. This is the build that leans hardest on motion and effects, so read adding motion alongside it.

Hold one note for thirty seconds while you work. A texture is judged over a length of time that would be absurd for any other instrument.

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 texture is built by letting notes overlap and pile up rather than by playing a line, and the long release below means a note is still sounding long after you have moved off it. In Mono each new note would steal the voice from the one still fading, which removes the layering that the sound is made of.
• Glide (production convention). Zero is the ordinary setting and it keeps the notes independent. Long glide times are worth trying here in a way they are not elsewhere: with attacks measured in seconds there is no transient for a slide to blur, so a very slow portamento reads as the whole bed drifting in pitch rather than as an audible slide between two notes.

Oscillator

A texture wants a tone with built-in complexity. Granular turns the source into a cloud of grains and is texture in its purest form, rarely still even before you add motion, so it is the route this build takes. A wavetable swept slowly is the other one, and it is written out as a variant at the end of the page.

• Osc1 Mode (production convention). Granular turns the source into a cloud of grains and is texture in its purest form, rarely still even before you add motion, which is why it is the start value and why the two grain rows below exist. Wavetable is the other route and is written out as a variant, because dropping the grain engine changes what has to supply the movement. Note that Gran Density and Gran Size are inert outside Granular: the wavetable engine does not read them at all.
• Osc1 Detune (production convention). The widest detune of any instrument here. A texture has no melody to stay in tune with and no transient to protect, so the smearing that would ruin a lead is exactly what fuses many copies into one shifting mass. This is the one sound where you can push a control until it nearly breaks and get a better result.
• Osc1 Drift (production convention). Same logic: instability is the point, not a defect.
• Osc1 Gran Density, when Osc1 Mode is Granular (acoustic fact). Density and grain size together decide whether you hear grains or a cloud. Dense enough that grains overlap and they fuse into a continuous wash; sparse (down in the single digits) and they separate into an audible rhythm, which is a rhythmic patch rather than a bed.
• Osc1 Gran Size, when Osc1 Mode is Granular (acoustic fact). Grains shorter than about 50 ms stop being heard as pitched events and start buzzing, because their length approaches the period of the pitch itself.

Filter

• Filter Type (production convention). A low-pass, so the filter is a slow lid over the whole bed rather than a colour on it. Formant is the one alternative worth the detour: with a texture there is no melody for a vowel to fight, so a slowly moving formant reads as the bed breathing, and the two rows below stop describing brightness once you take it.
• Filter Cutoff, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (production convention). Treat this as something that moves rather than a fixed setting, which is what the LFO routing in Movement is for. A slowly opening and closing filter is half of what makes a texture feel alive, and this row is only the point it moves around.
• Filter Reso, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (acoustic fact). Very low, and this is the one number on the page that is not an invitation to push further. Everything else here rewards excess. Resonance does not: a peak crawling slowly through a held drone is one of the more unpleasant sounds a synth can make, because the peak is stationary while the drone is not, so it whistles at whatever partial happens to pass under it.

Amp envelope

• Attack (production convention). Roughly double a pad's. The sound fades in over several bars, so it can be dropped into a mix without announcing itself. A texture should never start sharply.
• Decay (production convention). The sound keeps changing for as long as anyone is likely to listen.
• Sustain (production convention). Holds, but below full, so the slow decay still has somewhere to travel.
• Release (production convention). Dies away long after you let go, so one note overlaps the next into a continuous bed.

Movement

Movement over the note: arc, leaves the resting value, peaks, and returns (production convention).

A texture has no melodic job, so its movement is the whole content of the sound. An arc that leaves the resting value, peaks and returns gives the listener somewhere to be carried to and back, which is what makes a texture usable under an arrangement rather than merely present. Movement held at one strength becomes background within seconds, and a texture that has become background has failed at the only thing it was for.

How to build it: A knob motion contour on wavetable position or filter cutoff, since the shape is the point and a contour writes an exact absolute sweep. Length set to the note the patch is meant to be held for.

Movement is the whole point of a texture, and this is the longest section on the page for that reason. The principle is to run several slow modulations at rates that do not divide into one another, so they drift in and out of phase and the sound never repeats. An LFO at 0.04 Hz takes twenty-five seconds per cycle and one at 0.09 Hz takes about eleven, so the two cross at a different point every time.

Both of those rates are rows below, and so is a third LFO that modulates the first one's speed. Set all three, then leave a note held and listen for a minute before you decide any of it is working.

• LFO1 Rate (production convention). A cycle of twenty-five seconds. Run several modulations at rates that do not divide into one another and they drift in and out of phase, so the sound takes minutes to return to where it started. This is the first of the two rates that has to happen, and the LFO 2 rate below is the second.
• LFO2 Rate (production convention). The second rate, and the reason it is 0.09 rather than 0.08 is the whole technique. At 0.08 it would be exactly twice LFO 1 and the two would line up on every second cycle, so the sound would repeat every twenty-five seconds. At 0.09 the cycles are 25 s and about 11.1 s, which share no short common multiple, so the pair crosses at a different point every time and the bed takes minutes to come back to any state you have already heard. Any value that is not a simple ratio of LFO 1 will do; what matters is that you check it is not.
• LFO3 Rate (production convention). The slowest of the three, at about fifty seconds per cycle. An LFO that modulates another LFO's rate has to be slower than the one it is modulating, or the change in speed is heard as its own wobble instead of as the first LFO gradually speeding up and slowing down. Take it above LFO 1's own rate and the two swap roles, which is not what the routing is for.
• LFO 2 to Filter Cutoff (production convention). This is the routing the Filter section is written around. Without it the cutoff is a fixed lid and the filter contributes nothing, which is half the movement of a texture missing. Deep, because there is no transient for the sweep to smear and no melody for it to obscure: the slow opening and closing is meant to be the most audible thing happening.
• LFO 3 to LFO1 Rate (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Modulating the speed of the modulation, so even the sweep is not steady. Keep it small: this should stop the motion feeling mechanical, not make the rate audibly lurch.

Use the Chaos LFO shape, or the Organic mode on the phaser and flanger, for movement that never repeats. The Motion page is the place to watch all of this at once and confirm that the movements sit at different times rather than pulsing together.

Effects

• Reverb Mix (production convention). More than half the sound, which would be a mistake anywhere else. There is no transient and no rhythm for the wash to blur.
• Delay L (production convention). Set this and the right delay time to values that are unequal and not musical divisions of the tempo. The repeats then never line up with each other or with the track, so the delay reads as depth in a space rather than as echoes in time. Sync the delay instead and you have made a rhythmic part, which is the one thing a texture is not.
• Delay R (production convention). Deliberately not the same as the left. The offset is what turns two echoes into a space: keep them at least about 0.15 s apart, because closer than that the ear fuses them back into one centred repeat and the width is gone.
• Delay FB (production convention). With the two delay times set unequal and to non-musical values, high feedback piles the repeats up and feeds the reverb, which is where the sense of an endless environment comes from.

Variants

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

Wavetable texture

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

A wavetable swept slowly, rather than a cloud of grains. The difference is where the movement comes from. Granular is never quite still on its own: the grain engine is scattering and overlapping whether or not you modulate anything, so a texture built on it is already alive before the LFOs arrive. A wavetable is perfectly still until something moves it, so every bit of the evolution has to be routed by hand. That is the cost, and the gain is control. A swept wavetable goes somewhere on purpose, through timbres you chose, where a grain cloud goes everywhere at once. Reach for this when the bed has to arrive at a particular place rather than simply keep moving. Gran Density and Gran Size are inert here, because the wavetable engine does not read them.

• Osc1 Mode (production convention). The switch that defines the variant. Everything below exists because the grain engine is no longer supplying movement for free.
• Osc1 WT Pos, when Osc1 Mode is Wavetable (production convention). The full table is in range, which is true of no other instrument on any page here. Elsewhere a table position is a timbre you pick and keep. Here it is a place you pass through, so the only thing that matters about the start value is that it leaves room to travel in both directions.
• LFO 1 to Osc1 WT Pos (production convention). This routing is the variant. Without it the oscillator is a fixed tone and the patch is a pad with a very long attack. Deeper than the equivalent routing on a pad, which keeps to about 15 to 30% because a pad has a chord to hold together. A texture has no chord to protect, so the sweep can cover most of the table and the timbre can become genuinely unrecognisable over a minute.

Pulsed texture

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

A texture that keeps time. Everywhere else on this page the argument runs the other way: the delay times are deliberately unequal and unsynced, the LFO rates are chosen so no two of them line up twice, and all of that exists to stop the bed from turning into a rhythmic part. This variant grants exactly one exception and takes it seriously. The Volume Shaper cuts the finished bed to a tempo-locked pattern, so the sound arrives on the grid while everything underneath it stays as unsynced as the base band demands. That combination is the point, and it is why this is an articulation rather than a licence to sync the rest: the material is still a drifting cloud, only the amplitude has learned where the bar is. House and its neighbours treat an atmosphere layer this way as a matter of course, because in a track built on a four-to-the-floor kick a bed that ignores the grid does not read as spacious, it reads as late. Reach for it when the texture has to sit inside a rhythm section rather than float behind one. If the pattern is a plain duck on every beat you are building a sidechain and the base band already covers that at a low mix; this variant is for when the pattern itself is content.

• VolShaper Div (production convention). One cycle of the drawn curve spans a whole bar, so the sixteen steps of the table land as a bar-long pattern rather than as a shape repeating inside every beat. This is the row that separates the variant from an ordinary pump: at 1/4 the table is a duck you hear four times a bar, and no drawn pattern survives being repeated that often. Two bars is in range because a texture is held long enough for the ear to learn a longer phrase, which is the one place a slower cycle earns its keep.
• VolShaper Mix (production convention). High enough that the pattern is the articulation and not an effect on it. Under about 40% the gaps never reach silence and the result reads as tremolo on a drone, which is the base band's soft duck rather than this variant. Short of 100% on purpose: leaving some of the bed underneath the gate keeps the tail of the reverb and the grain cloud audible through the closed steps, and that continuity is what stops a pulsed texture from turning into a stuttering pad.

The two variants are on different axes, so a patch can take both: a wavetable texture that is also pulsed is a legal combination, and the overrides simply stack.

Draw the curve rather than accepting the default ramp. The default is a sawtooth falling from full to silence, which is the sidechain shape, and over a whole bar it reads as one long fade rather than as a pattern. Sixteen steps across the bar gives you a sixteenth-note grid to work on. Leave the steps uneven: a gap where a listener expects a hit is what makes a pattern sound played rather than programmed.

Set the phase offset if the gate lands in the wrong place. The curve is anchored to the host's bar line, so a pattern written against a kick on beat one stays put when you move the part around the arrangement.

Whichever route you take, the test is the same. Hold one note and leave it. A texture that has stopped changing after a minute has not failed at being pretty, it has failed at being a texture. A pulsed texture is not exempt: a gate repeating unchanged is still something that has stopped changing, which is why the motion contour is required here as it is everywhere else on this page.