Authoring a rave stab

A stab is a chord that stops. It is the sound of early 1990s rave and everything built on it since: house, techno, garage, hard house. One short, bright, dirty chord, hit on the offbeat, carrying the whole harmony of a track that otherwise has none.

The two things that make it are the envelope and the chord. The envelope has to be fast enough that each hit is over before the next one lands, because the silence between them is the rhythm. The chord has to be in the key, which sounds obvious until you try to build one and find that most ways of getting a second oscillator to harmonise put it in the wrong key three notes later.

This page is a complete build. Choose New, in the Menu button in the top left corner, to clear the patch back to a single unshaped oscillator, then work down the sections in order: the raw tone, then its shape, then the effects that finish it. You do not need to have built anything else first.

What you get is a rhythm instrument that happens to carry harmony. Push it in one direction and it stops being a stab and becomes something the instrument guides cover in more depth: Pluck once it is one note rather than a chord, Pad once the chords are held long enough to evolve, and Keys once it is played as an instrument rather than as a part. Their tables are not this one's, and they are not meant to be: a pad's envelope is measured in seconds where a stab lives in hundredths. Follow the page whose sound you are actually building.

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 style 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 stab is a chord, and the chorder below turns one key into several notes, so the patch needs voices to put them in. Mono would collapse the chord to its last note, which is the one setting that stops this style working at all.

Key and chord

This section is unusual for a build guide: it comes before the oscillator rather than after it. That is deliberate. Setting the key is what lets three later controls answer to the music instead of to a fixed number, and if you skip it now those controls will look like they do nothing.

Set the root to whatever key your track is in. The manual cannot give you a start value for that one, and a table that pretended otherwise would be telling you which key to write in.

• Scale (production convention). House, techno and hard house are written in minor keys far more often than major, and the minor stab is what the style is remembered for. Dorian raises the sixth, which is the brighter, more danceable minor that garage and deep house lean on. Harmonic minor raises the seventh and gives the stab the eastern-sounding leading tone that hard trance uses. Set the root to whatever key the track is in: the point of setting a key at all is that the two rows below and the Osc2 Degree row then answer to it.
• Chord On (production convention). The switch the whole style rests on. With it off you are playing single notes and every row below shapes the wrong thing. Sample libraries solve the same problem by recording a separate chord for every voicing they want; here one key press builds the chord, so it is in your key and your inversion rather than the one that happened to be sampled.
• Chord Type (production convention). Triad is the plain three-note stab. Triad 7 adds the seventh, which is the deep house and tech house sound: a minor seventh chord is the single most recognisable harmony in that music. Fifths drops the third entirely and is the hard house and hard trance stab, where the third would fight the distortion. Both Triad shapes read the key, so the chord on the second degree comes out minor and the one on the fifth comes out dominant without you choosing per key.
• Chord Voicing (acoustic fact). Close packs the chord into one octave, which keeps it compact and punchy, and a stab is a rhythmic event before it is a harmonic one. Open lifts every other note an octave, and it is the fix rather than a preference: below about C3 a close triad puts a major third within a few semitones of the root, the two partials beat against each other and the chord turns to mud. Play low and voice open.

The chorder sits before the arpeggiator, so if you turn the arpeggiator on later it arpeggiates the chord rather than the single key you pressed. That is the rolling broken-chord line the same records use between the stabs.

Oscillator

Two layers, and the point of this section is that they are different from each other and still agree. Osc 1 is the body of the chord. Osc 2 is a second colour sitting a third above it.

The row that does the work is Osc2 Degree, and it is worth understanding before you set it. Every synthesizer lets you transpose an oscillator by semitones. Four semitones above a C is a major third, which sounds right, and four semitones above a D is also a major third, which does not, because the third above D in a minor key is minor. A fixed offset is correct in one chord and wrong in the next, and that is why a second oscillator is normally only ever moved by octaves and fifths: those are the two intervals that stay the same wherever you put them.

Degree counts steps of the key instead of semitones. At two steps, Osc 2 plays a third that is major or minor depending on which note you are on, so it harmonises whatever you play, in whatever key you set, anywhere on the keyboard. Sample libraries reach the same place by recording a separate chord for every voicing they want and shipping hundreds of them.

Set Osc2 Degree to 0 first, play a few chords, then set it to 2 and play the same ones. Do that with Chord Type on Fifths rather than on Triad. A triad already contains its own third, so at Degree 2 above one, Osc 2 mostly lands on notes the chorder has already placed and the switch moves very little. Fifths stacks the root, the fifth and the ninth, which are the intervals that hold their size in every key, so the chord has no quality of its own until Degree gives it one. The difference between 0 and 2 is then a hollow power stack against a full minor chord, and that is the whole reason this page exists.

The factory preset Rave Stab is built that way, if you would rather hear it before you build it.

• Osc1 Mode (production convention). A stack of saws is the raw material. Wavetable with a square or pulse table is the other historical route, and it is the harder, more hollow organ stab of early rave rather than the fuller synth stab.
• Osc1 Unison, when Osc1 Mode is Wavetable or SuperSaw (production convention). Fewer copies than a trance stack. The chorder is already putting three or four notes on the keyboard, so every extra unison copy multiplies against them: six unison on a four-note chord is twenty-four detuned saws, and the chord stops being legible long before it stops being loud.
• Osc1 Detune, when Osc1 Mode is Wavetable or SuperSaw (production convention). Lower than retro wave, which is itself far lower than trance, and for the same reason taken one step further. Detune smears a chord, and a stab has a fraction of a second to be heard as a chord before the envelope closes. Past about 25 ct the notes of the triad start sliding into each other and the stab reads as a noise burst with a pitch rather than as a harmony.
• Osc2 Mode (production convention). Osc 2 is the second colour, and it should not be the same colour as Osc 1. A wavetable set to an organ-like or square table against a saw stack is the classic pairing. Modal makes the upper layer a struck metal bank, which is the brighter, bell-edged version of the same idea.
• Osc2 Degree (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only, and the row that makes the two layers agree. It offsets Osc 2 by steps of the key rather than by semitones, so at 2 it plays a diatonic third: major over one degree of the scale and minor over the next, following the chord instead of fighting it. A fixed semitone offset cannot do this, which is why a second oscillator is normally only transposed by octaves and fifths. At 4 it plays a fifth above, which thickens rather than harmonises and is the setting for hard house. Set it to 0 for one plain colour, which is worth hearing first so the row's effect is obvious.
• Osc2 Level (production convention). Under the main layer, not level with it. The harmony line is a colour on the chord: bring it up to equal and the ear hears two chords a third apart rather than one chord with a bright top, which is the point at which the trick stops working.
• Osc2 Octave (production convention). Keep the harmony layer in the same octave to start, so the two colours interlock. An octave up separates them and turns Osc 2 into a bright topping over the chord, which suits the thinner organ stab. Below the played note the third lands in the register the bassline needs and the chord loses its floor.
• Warmth (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only pre-filter saturation. It rounds the top of the stack before the filter, which is most of what separates a sound that came out of a machine from one that came out of a plugin. Higher here than on a sustained patch: a stab is heard for a moment and needs its character stated immediately.

Notes you play outside the key are read as the nearest note inside it, so Osc 2 stays in the key even when your hand does not.

Filter

Two layers that are genuinely different need two filters, or the difference gets averaged away as soon as they are mixed. Split routing sends Osc 1 through filter 1 and Osc 2 through filter 2.

Split does nothing while filter 2 is Off, and it fails quietly: the engine falls back to putting both layers through filter 1, which is exactly the outcome the routing was set to prevent. Set the Filter 2 rows or leave the routing on Series.

• Filter Routing (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only. Split sends Osc 1 through filter 1 and Osc 2 through filter 2, so the two layers get their own shaping. This is what makes the pair of oscillators read as two instruments playing a harmony rather than as one blended tone: the lower layer keeps its body while the harmony layer above it is filtered to sit as a colour. Series puts everything through one filter and gives up that separation, which is the simpler build.
• Filter Type (production convention). A steep low pass on the main layer. Steep rather than gentle because the envelope below has to make an audible sweep in about a tenth of a second, and a 12 dB slope does not move enough spectrum in that time to be heard as an attack.
• Filter Cutoff, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (production convention). The resting point the envelope falls back to, not the brightness of the note. Below about 1800 Hz the stab loses the bite that lets it cut through a kick and a bassline. Past about 6000 Hz there is nothing above for the envelope to open into and the attack flattens out.
• Filter Reso, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (acoustic fact). A peak sharpens the front of each hit. Kept modest for the reason a chord always imposes: a resonant peak sits at one frequency while a triad has three or four, so it reinforces whichever chord tone happens to be nearest and quietly rebalances the harmony. Past about 40% you hear the filter singing rather than the chord.
• Filt Env (acoustic fact). The control that makes it a stab rather than a chord. Every struck or plucked instrument is brightest at the instant it is struck and darkens as it decays, because the high partials lose energy first. This routes the amp envelope to the cutoff and reproduces that. Negative values invert it and give the backwards, swelling sound, which is a different effect and not this one.
• Filter 2 Type (production convention). Filter 2 shapes the harmony layer, and Split does nothing at all while this is left Off: the engine collapses back to the single-filter path and both layers go through filter 1, which is the one thing the routing row exists to prevent. Band pass is the useful choice because it removes the harmony layer's own low end, which would otherwise stack a third on top of the main layer's fundamental and thicken the bottom of the chord.
• Filter 2 Cutoff (production convention). Places the harmony layer above the body of the chord. Too low and it competes with the main layer's fundamental instead of colouring it. Past about 2500 Hz it separates from the chord entirely and reads as a second instrument rather than as part of the stab.

Amp envelope

This is the section that decides whether you have built a stab or a chord. Everything above it is colour.

• Attack (acoustic fact). As fast as it goes. A stab is a percussive event and the attack is the whole identity of one. Past about 10 ms the front edge softens audibly and the hit stops landing on the beat, because what the ear times a note by is the start of its rise, not its peak.
• Decay (production convention). The row that decides the style. A stab is a chord that stops, and this is where it stops. Around 0.18 s the hit is over well inside an eighth note at 128 BPM, so consecutive stabs stay separate. Under 0.08 s it becomes a click with a pitch. Past about 0.35 s the stabs overlap and you have a chord pad, which is a different sound with different rules.
• Sustain (production convention). At zero the note is gone whether or not you are still holding the key, which is what makes the rhythm come from the pattern you play rather than from how long you hold. A little sustain leaves a quiet bed under the hits, useful when the stab is the only harmonic part in the track.
• Release (production convention). Short, and shorter than the decay. With sustain at zero the release only matters for keys let go during the decay, and a long one there reintroduces the overlap the decay was set to avoid.

Check it against the tempo you are actually working at rather than against the numbers here. The test is that a hit has finished before the next one starts: at 128 BPM an eighth note is about 0.23 s, so a decay of 0.18 s leaves a gap you can hear. At 150 BPM the same setting starts to overlap and wants shortening.

Effects

The grit is not decoration. Early rave stabs were played back through samplers that stored audio at 12 bits, and the noise that added is now part of what the style sounds like rather than a limitation anyone was trying to work around.

Order matters here: crush first, then tape. That is the path the original records took, sampled digitally and then mixed to tape, and it is why the result sounds worn rather than merely broken. Tape before crush gives you a clean digital edge on a saturated signal, which is the wrong way round.

• Dist Mode (production convention). The stabs of the early 1990s were played back through samplers with 12 bits of resolution, and the grit that added is now part of what the style sounds like rather than a limitation anyone is working around. Bit Crush reproduces it directly. Decimate reduces the sample rate instead, which is the harsher, more aliased version. Soft Clip is the clean route if the crush fights the mix.
• Dist Drive (production convention). Enough to hear as texture, not as damage. Distortion is harder on a chord than on a single note: it generates sum and difference tones between every pair of partials, so a four-note chord produces intermodulation a lead never does. Past about 50% those products blur the harmony and the chord loses its quality.
• Dist Mix (production convention). Blending the crushed signal against the clean one keeps the fundamental intact while the grit rides on top. This is why the mix control matters more here than the drive: at full wet the chord is entirely made of intermodulation products, and dialling the drive back to compensate loses the character too.
• Tape Drive (production convention). Tape after the crush, in that order. The crush adds hard digital edges and tape rounds them, which is the path the original records actually took: sampled digitally, then mixed and mastered to tape. It also compresses the transient a little, which glues consecutive stabs into a groove.
• Reverb Size (production convention). A modest room. A big hall fills the silence the envelope just made, and that silence is the rhythm. Large sizes belong on the held chords this style is not built from.
• Reverb Mix (production convention). Enough to place the stab in a space without softening its front edge. Reverb is the effect most likely to undo everything the envelope did, because it fills in exactly the gap between hits.
• Reverb Gate (production convention). Cuts the tail the moment the hit stops, so the stab gets a burst of space rather than a wash. It is the control that lets you use more reverb than the row above would otherwise allow: the gate takes back the gap that the tail was filling.
• Delay Mix (production convention). A tempo-synced delay is what turns a stab on the beat into a pattern across the bar, and a dotted eighth is the division the style uses because it lands off the grid and pulls against the kick. Past about 35% the repeats compete with the hits they came from and the rhythm blurs.

Set the delay to a dotted eighth. It lands off the grid and pulls against the kick, which is what turns a stab on the beat into a figure across the bar.