Authoring a style

The instrument guides build one kind of sound: a bass, a pad, a pluck. The pages here build a recognisable style instead. A style is not a preset category and it is not a slot in the browser. It is a set of choices across the whole patch that together sound like a particular kind of record.

Each page is a complete build. Start from a blank patch, follow the same four steps as the instrument guides, and the sound is finished when you reach the end of the page. Every control gets a start value and a range to try. See how to read these tables for what the provenance tags mean.

• Retro wave. The bright, wide, chorused sound of 1980s synth pop: a detuned saw stack, a ladder filter, a wide ensemble chorus, and a gated reverb.
• Trance. The wide, sustaining supersaw anthem, built from stacked oscillators that each carry their own detune and drift, so every layer breathes against the others.
• Rave stab. The short, dirty chord hit of early 1990s rave and everything built on it: a chord that stops, a second oscillator harmonising it in the key, and the bit-crushed grit of the samplers it was first played on.

All three are built from detuned sawtooth stacks, and comparing them teaches more than any one page does alone.

Two of them differ by degree. Retro wave keeps the detune near 25 cents, because it is played as chords and a triad smears if you push further. Trance goes past 40 cents until the beating between the copies stops being a defect and becomes the timbre itself.

The rave stab differs on a second axis entirely, and it is the axis the other two share: time. Retro wave and trance both sustain, so their pages spend their effort on what happens while a note is held. A stab has no while. Its decay is measured in hundredths of a second, the silence between hits is the rhythm, and every other choice on the page follows from that: less detune again than retro wave, because there is even less time for a chord to be heard as a chord, and a filter envelope doing in a tenth of a second what a pad has ten seconds to do.

Each page ends by pointing at the instrument pages, which carry the detail a style page does not repeat: what a lead needs to stay expressive, what a pad needs to keep moving, what a bass needs to hold the low end.