Playing and Performance

This page covers the controls that affect how Kiwisynth responds as you play: the master output, how notes are allocated, and the performance controls a keyboard sends.

Master output

Master Volume. The final output level of the instrument, found in the Master card in the strip along the bottom of the window. It sets how loud Kiwisynth is as a whole.

Two readouts sit in the same card. Voices counts the notes sounding now against the most the instrument can play at once. CPU shows how much of the time available for each block of audio Kiwisynth spends rendering it, as a percent. It turns amber as the headroom shrinks and red when a dense passage is about to run out of time.

Monitoring level

Kiwisynth renders with headroom, so a preset sits at the level a mix wants rather than at the level a finished master plays at. In a host you win that back on the track fader. The standalone app has no fader, which makes a quiet pad or texture harder to judge than it should be.

Trim raises what the app plays without touching the sound. Open Settings from the app menu and choose Monitoring. It runs from 0 dB, where the app plays exactly what the engine rendered, up to +12 dB. The level follows the slider as you drag it, and the app remembers where you left it.

The trim is a property of your machine, not of the sound. It is never saved into a preset, never sent to a host, and never part of a rendered file. Someone else opening your preset hears it at the level you designed, not at the level you auditioned it.

Enough trim will push the output past full scale. Kiwisynth allows that rather than holding you back, and tells you when it happens: CLIP appears in the Master card for a moment. While it is showing, what you are hearing is no longer the sound. Lower the trim before judging anything by it.

This section does not appear when Kiwisynth runs as a plugin, where monitoring level belongs to the host's mixer.

Master Tune

A global pitch offset for the whole instrument, shared by every oscillator and the sub. At its default of zero, every note plays at concert pitch. Move it up or down and every voice shifts by the same amount, up to a full octave in either direction.

It sits in the Master card beside Master Volume, as a field reading in cents. Drag it up or down, hold Shift while you drag to move a cent at a time, or double-click it and type the offset you want. A value is easier to set exactly than to aim at, which is why it is a number and not a knob.

Drop a modulation source on the field, as you would on a knob, and it bends the whole voice at once: every oscillator and the sub move together. A slow Chaos LFO in Global mode dropped here gives the sag of a stretched tape, the whole sound drifting in and out of key. The routing appears on the Matrix page, where you set its depth; a depth of 0.25 bends 50 cents, a quarter tone, which is where a bend starts to sound out of key.

Right-click the field to give it a movement over each note, as on a knob. Every key then runs the curve from its own start: a Rise at full Amount glides each note up an octave over the Length you set and holds it there, and a smaller Amount glides it less far.

It is also worth reaching from a script: the built-in pitch wheel is linear, but you can target Master Tune with a curve of your own and shape how the wheel feels under your hand.

Mod wheel

The Keys button in the header opens the keys row, and the row has a mod wheel at its left end that you can move with the mouse. A mod wheel is a standard performance control: many sounds use it to bring in vibrato, open the tone, or add movement as you play. The wheel on screen and the wheel on your keyboard are one control, so moving either one moves the other.

Poly and Mono

The Voice control, on the Oscillators page, decides how many notes can sound at once.

Poly, short for polyphonic, lets many notes sound together, so you can play chords. This is the normal choice for pads, keys and chords.

Mono, short for monophonic, allows only one note at a time; a new note takes over from the last. This is the usual choice for basses and solo lines, where overlapping notes would muddy the sound.

Glide

Glide, also called portamento, makes the pitch slide from one note to the next instead of jumping. The Glide control is on the Oscillators page. With it raised, hold one note, play another, and the pitch slides between them. Glide is most natural in Mono.

Macros

Macros are four general-purpose knobs you can connect to anything. They sit on the bar along the bottom, so they stay in reach on every page. A macro does nothing on its own; you assign it by dragging its handle onto the knob you want it to move. The point of a macro is to gather several changes under one knob, so a single move can reshape a sound. Macros are also a tidy thing to control from your music software.

Expressive keyboards (MPE)

Most keyboards send one pressure and one pitch bend for the whole instrument. An MPE keyboard sends them for each note separately, so you can press into, slide and bend one note in a chord without affecting the others.

Kiwisynth supports MPE in full. Per-note pressure, slide and glide are available as movement sources on the Modulation page, the same as an LFO or an envelope. If you do not have an MPE keyboard, nothing here needs your attention.

Sustain pedal

Kiwisynth responds to a sustain pedal. While the pedal is held, notes you release keep sounding, and they fade only when you lift the pedal. This is the usual behaviour for keyboard parts.