Kiwisynth: the wavetable synthesizer, in full

Start simple · Sound page

Two questions instead of a wall of knobs

Getting a usable sound out of a new synth usually costs an evening. Simple Mode asks two questions instead: what the note is made of, and what changes while it sounds. Those are its two pages, Sound and Motion. It hides the vocabulary rather than the engine, so anything made here opens in the full editor with every choice showing up as ordinary controls.

The Timbre Library sets the basic character: a short list of starting tones in families, each drawn with a small picture of its shape
The Sound Map is one pad you drag, dark to bright across, smooth to harsh up and down, marked with roughly where bass, lead, pad, keys and pluck sounds tend to sit. It steers within the character you picked rather than overriding it
Tone and Density run continuously between named positions, Glass to Murky and Mono to Wall. Park between two names and the name dims, because you are between two things rather than at one
Every effect Kiwisynth has, under a plain name: Space, Echo, Width, Sweep, Jet, Wobble Filter, Warmth, Grit, Glue, Pump and Tone Shape
The audition bar loops a phrase that suits the sound, a bass line for a bass, a slow chord for a pad, so both hands stay free while you steer

Simple Mode's Sound page: the Timbre Library, the Sound Map, the Tone and Density sliders and the effect chips

Start simple · Motion page

See when it brightens against when it swells

The Motion page draws a single note left to right, with a line marking where you let go of the key. Everything that moves gets a row, and each row reads as a sentence: what moves, what its movement looks like over the note, how much, and what else drives it. Loudness and Brightness are always there. A friendlier set of ordinary synth controls cannot teach this, because an attack in seconds and an LFO rate never show you the timing between two things.

Shapes are chosen by name: Steady, Swell, Pluck, Gate and Rise. Click the picture beside one to draw the curve yourself, with the named shapes still along the bottom of the pad, so drawing is never a decision you cannot undo
Modulation is a chip you drag: wobble, velocity, wheel and random sit above the controls on both pages. Drop one on a control and it starts following it
The chips cover only what is not the note itself, which is why there is no swell chip. A swell is a shape, and every lane already has one
One word can mean three different things underneath, the amp envelope, a motion contour, or a modulation routing, and Simple Mode never says which, because it does not change what you meant

Simple Mode's Motion page: one note on a shared time axis with a key-up line, the chip tray, and a lane per moving control

Sound · Oscillators

One engine, five oscillator modes

Three main oscillators, a sub, and a noise source mix together. Each main oscillator can run as a wavetable, a SuperSaw, a plucked string, a tuned resonator, or a cloud of grains, so a single engine covers a wide range of sounds. A little warmth runs under all of it on every note, and that is part of the instrument's character.

Wavetable: move the position to sweep through a row of waveforms, with Warp for Bend, PWM, Sync, or Wavefold on top
SuperSaw: a thick stack of detuned saws in one step, the wide sound behind dance leads
Karplus-Strong: a plucked-string model with damping, brightness, and pick position
Modal: a tuned partial bank that rings like a bell or marimba. Granular: a source scattered into grains, rarely still even before you add movement
Load your own audio (WAV, FLAC or MP3) as a wavetable, or a sample to granulate. The preset then saves as one self-contained file
Degree on oscillator 2 offsets it in steps of your key instead of semitones, so it plays a major third over one chord and a minor third over the next. It harmonises what you play instead of only transposing it

The Kiwisynth window on the Oscillators tab, with the audition bar and the tab strip

Shape · Filter and voicing

Dual filters, and a voice that drifts on its own

Every voice has two filters, the second off until you switch it on. Cutoff sets where the filter acts, Resonance adds a peak that can ring into self-oscillation, and Drive adds saturation for warmth. Around that, the voicing controls keep a sound from ever settling into a dead stillness.

Filter types from LP12 and LP24 to a ladder-style MGLow24, high-pass, band-pass, notch, comb, and formant
Run two filters in series, parallel, or split
Unison stacks voices, Detune spreads them, and Drift lets each wander on its own
Breath adds the small movements of a real player: drift, swell, and a vibrato that fades in

Shape · Modulation

Build modulation where you want it

There is no grid to fill in: modulation is added at the knob you want to move. Right-click and pick an intent: Wobble for a looping LFO, Fade in or Fade out for an envelope, Follow mod wheel, velocity, or a macro, or Humanize for a fresh random offset per note. Each intent reads the knob and picks musical defaults, so a wobble on wavetable position is a slow drift and the same wobble on pitch is a narrow vibrato.

Drop a source onto an LFO's rate or an envelope's time, so one movement drives another
Per routing: depth from -1 to +1, smoothing in milliseconds, and audio rate where it earns it, on FM depth or oscillator tune
The Matrix tab is a read-only map with a live trace per source; the modulation timeline draws every modulator over the last note's eight seconds
Sources: 4 LFOs, 2 envelopes, 2 MSEGs, 2 step sequencers, 4 macros, Sample & Hold, keytrack, velocity, mod wheel, aftertouch, and full MPE

Shape · Motion

Draw how a knob moves, then see everything at once

A patch that sits still sounds like a patch. Every modulatable knob carries a thin ring: click it and a movement editor opens on that knob, where you give the control a contour that leaves its setting and returns. Start from Swell, Rise or Fall, or draw the curve by hand. The knob still sets where the sound rests, so it keeps its plain meaning and the movement is added on top.

You animate only the few controls you care about. A patch with nothing attached behaves exactly as it did before the feature existed
The Motion tab draws one note's whole life on a shared time axis: the oscillators as bands above, one lane per moving control below, and a dashed line where the note is released
A lane appears for anything that actually moves, whether you drew it or a mod envelope, a per-voice LFO, a Bloom source or the filter envelope did. You do not have to remember which mechanism a patch used
Lanes are ordered by how far each control travels, and a control that stays still gets no lane, so a flat picture means a flat patch

The Kiwisynth Motion tab: oscillator bands above, contour lanes below on one time axis

Shape · Bloom

Sources that respond to how you play

Three modulation sources that read your performance, not just your notes. They come set up inside presets, and you can point any of them at a knob.

Chord

A reading of the chord you hold. A plain fifth reads low; a dense or dissonant chord reads high. The sound answers the harmony you play.

Bloom

A rise from nothing to full over the first seconds of a held note, at the Note Bloom Rate. Each note carries its own, to open a filter or lift an effect as it sustains.

Repetition

A value that climbs each time you return to the same note, nudging a repeated part toward variety.

Effects

A rack on the finished sound, and a cloud inside the note

Per-voice Texture and distortion, then a rack of effects on the mix. Drag the cards to reorder them, and every effect has a bypass, so anything you switch off costs no CPU.

Texture sprays grains cut from the note's own sound back over it, before the filter, so the cloud carries whatever the patch is doing and dies with the note. Hold a pluck and it blooms into a haze made of the pluck
Chorus to thicken and widen, with an Ensemble mode that drifts like an old string machine
A tempo-syncable stereo ping-pong delay with a beat-repeat stutter, and a reverb with a shimmer tail for cinematic pads, a long mode past eight seconds and a gate for 1980s bursts
3-band EQ, multiband saturator, an auto-filter, a tape character, and a phaser and flanger that both drift on a sweep that never repeats
A Volume Shaper for tempo-locked pumping and trance-gate patterns, built in, no external kick needed
A disperser smears a sharp attack into a descending ring, the laser zap of bass music, and its Center is a good target for a note-age source

Performance · Chord and arpeggiator

One finger, a running arpeggio in the right key

The Perform tab is a pipeline your notes travel through: chord, then arp, then voices. The Chord stage turns one key press into a stack that follows your key, so you play a degree and the key decides the quality. Switch the arpeggiator on after it and it arpeggiates the chord that one key built.

Eight patterns: Up, Down, Up and Down, Down and Up, As Played, Random, Random Unique, and Chord
Six rate divisions, gate length, octave range, and a velocity fade. Chance drops steps at random while the timing keeps running, for a broken feel
Ratchet fires a step two, three, or four times in quick succession, and Ratchet Fade lets each hit fall away so a roll reads as one note with a tail
Chord types run from Power and Octave to Triad, Sus, and Quartal, with Close, Open, and Drop 2 voicings
Tuning retunes each note of the key: Just, Pythagorean and Meantone sit beside Equal, so a triad in the home key stops beating
MIDI Out sends the arpeggio, the chord and any script notes to your host, so a generated pattern can be recorded as editable MIDI
Both are off by default, so no preset changes under you until you switch them on

The Perform pipeline strip: Keys, Script, Chord, Arp, Voices, MIDI Out, with the active stages lit

Scripting

A Script page for what the knobs cannot do

The Script page adds a small BASIC-style language that reaches what the matrix structurally cannot: branching on a threshold, memory across events, a gesture staged over time, a CC that fires a note. It never replaces the engine, it adds to it. The knob still owns its value; the script contributes a movement.

Ten handlers: on init, on key, on note, on release, on tick, on beat, on cc(N), on pitchbend, on aftertouch, on transport
on key runs before the voice exists, and is the only place pitch and velocity are writable. One line of scale_quantize there means never playing a wrong note again
Deterministic by design: the clock counts samples, not wall time, and the seed is pinned, so an offline render and a live take agree. Print the track twice and get the same take
Sandboxed: no file or network access, a statement budget per handler, and a script that cannot crash the audio thread

Presets

Tools for finding and blending sounds

A factory library covering bass, FX, keys, lead, pad, pluck and texture, plus a system for shaping them into your own. Filter by category, by how involved a patch is, or by character words like warm, bright, dark and evolving.

A/B morphing

Load two presets into slots A and B and move a slider between them. Kiwisynth blends their parameters and their movement, so the in-between positions are real sounds of their own.

Smart browser

Filter the library by category, by how involved a patch is, and by character words like warm, bright, dark, and evolving.

Section presets

Borrow just the oscillators, the filter, or the modulation from another sound, and keep the rest of your patch.

Modulation randomiser

Reshape only the movement of a patch and leave the base sound alone. You set how far it goes, from a nudge to a full rewire.

Animate This

Right-click a control and it adds a fitting movement to that one knob, chosen for what the knob does.

Save and share

Save your own sounds alongside the factory set, and export a preset as a file. A patch that carries imported audio saves self-contained.

Guides

Build one and you learn the instrument

Loading a preset shows you a finished sound. Building one teaches you why it works. The manual carries a complete build from a blank patch for every category in the browser: bass, lead, pad, pluck, keys, texture, and FX, plus three full styles: retro wave, trance and rave stab. Read the guides →

Every number is explained

Each control gets a starting value and a range to try, with the reason behind it. A number you cannot explain is a number to copy, not a control you have learned.

It says how far to trust it

Every figure is tagged: acoustic fact, production convention, or Kiwisynth's own judgment. The guides tell you which of their claims are the weakest, and to trust your ears over them.

It transfers

Why vibrato sits between 5 and 7 Hz, and why octaves fuse where fifths read as harmony, are facts about instruments. They will serve you in any synth you open.

Compared to

Where it sits

Kiwisynth is measured against the frontier wavetable and hybrid synths: Serum, Vital, Pigments and Phase Plant. All four are excellent, and they move, so treat the contrasts below as current rather than permanent.

What it does that they do not

None of the four ships a user scripting layer, and the tools that do are modular builders like Reaktor and Max, which are a different kind of product. Velocity and aftertouch sources are universal, but a source that reads the harmonic tension of the chord you are holding, and one that climbs as you return to the same note, are not. Serum and Vital are deliberately clean by default and leave character to you. Kiwisynth takes the other side of that choice and runs warmth and a note-age bloom on every note of every preset.

What they do that it does not

The rack has no compressor. The two step-sequencer modulation sources have no editor yet, so a patch can inherit a sequence but you cannot draw one, and Pigments and Phase Plant both give you a grid. Tuning is the sharpest gap: Just, Pythagorean and Meantone ship alongside Equal, but there is no Scala or MTS-ESP support, so Kiwisynth cannot load a scale someone else designed or follow a host-wide tuning master, and it stays at twelve notes per octave.

Under the hood

Specifications

Oscillators	3 main (Wavetable, SuperSaw, Karplus-Strong, Modal, or Granular), plus a sub and a noise source. OSC3 silent by default for per-oscillator stacks
FM	A layer over the three oscillators: 4 operators, 5 algorithms, per-operator ADSR and feedback
Filters	2 per voice: LP12, LP24, MGLow24, HP12, HP24, band-pass, notch, comb, formant, with series, parallel, or split routing
Modulation	4 LFOs, 2 envelopes, 2 MSEGs, 2 step sequencers, 4 macros, Sample & Hold, keytrack, performance and MPE, and the Bloom sources
Effects	Per-voice Texture and distortion (soft clip, hard clip, fold back, bit crush, decimate) plus a reorderable rack: Auto-Filter, Chorus, Delay, Reverb, Equaliser, Multiband Saturator, Volume Shaper, Tape, Phaser, Flanger, Disperser
Perform	A one-way pipeline: keys, script, chord, arp, voices, MIDI out. 8 arpeggiator patterns; chords follow the key across 10 scales and 4 tunings, and OSC2 can follow it too
Scripting	BASIC-style, 10 per-event handlers, a Script Depth knob, deterministic by default, sandboxed
Performance	Poly and mono voicing, glide / portamento, full MPE, mod wheel, sustain pedal
Presets	A factory library across seven categories, plus your own. `.json`, or `.kiwi` when a patch carries imported audio. Older `.kwpreset` and `.kwsz` files still import
Formats	VST3, CLAP
Platforms	Windows 10+ and Linux (glibc 2.35 or newer, X11)

Open the editor and shape your own sounds