Hello! I am delighted that you are using Pondular!
Pondular is a unique way of interacting with a synth.
The grid on the screen is your "pond." Playing notes or clicking creates ripples in the pond. The friction and viscosity parameters control how the ripples move and evolve, and the motion in the pond affects the sound of the synth.
Most of the Pondular interface contains the grid that represents your pond. When you play notes or click on the pond, you will see ripples moving through the pond. The movement of the pond affects the sound of the synth in a way determined by the control map. You can also right-click on the pond to stop its motion (this may be useful when the pond is spiralling out of control).
Besides the pond, the other controls on the interface are:
In addition, you can use the mod wheel to change the colors used in the pond.
If you want to get down and dirty with your host's built-in editor, you can make your own control maps.
There are twelve Pondular controllers. Each one examines some aspect of the pond and modulates a synth parameter based on that. Six settings determine how exactly this happens.
"Type" determines how the activity in the pond is mapped to a parameter value.
The size of a fixed grid point on the pond is mapped to a synth parameter.
The smallest point in a fixed row is located. The location of the smallest point is mapped to a parameter value. If the smallest point is near the left side of the pond, the value will be negative. If the smallest point is near the right side of the pond, the value will be positive.
Like row trough, but the biggest point in the row is used.
Like row trough, but the smallest point in a column is used.
Like column trough, but the biggest point in a column is used.
"Xpos" determines the horizontal location in the grid to use for the controller. If the type is "row peak" or "row trough," the xpos is ignored.
"Ypos" determines the vertical location in the grid. If the type is "column peak" or "column trough," the ypos is ignored.
"Dest" specifies which synth parameter will be affected by this controller.
"Scale" specificies the degree to which the controller can affect its parameter.
"Sample" determines how often the controller will modulate its synth parameter. If it's set to "continuous," the synth parameters will be updated immediately. The other settings are note values relative to the host tempo. For example, if it's set to "1/8," then its parameter will be modified once every eighth note.
Pondular is fairly CPU hungry, in large part because of the animation. If you are using all your CPU and getting clicks, try reducing the size of the pond to reduce the load of calculating in the animation. Alternately, try reducing the envelope release to use fewer synth voices.
If you have a big monitor, you probably would like the pond to use all that screen space sometimes. Alternately, if you have a small monitor, you might want to make the window smaller to fit on your screen. Just go to your VST directory and open the file called pondular.cfg.txt in any text editor (such as Notepad). There will be a line saying something like size 600 600; this represents the dimensions of the Pondular window. Change 600 600 to whatever size you want the window to be. Then save the file and restart Pondular.
Pondular was designed and written by Kevin Ferguson. If you enjoyed it, please also check out my soft synth Mopis at www.mopis-synth.com.
Thanks are also due to:
Pondular is part of the KVR Developer Challenge 2006, so I would also like to thank: