Fsynthz.com
A sound morphing synth with chord recognition for autobass/arp/gate, made with SynthEdit |
Play a chord. Take a listen. Play some melody. Take another chord...
And yes, there are tooltips on all controls.
Tone Generator
You see the 9 controls of two sliders each. A pair of sliders sets the range for the changes to take place within. A yellow-red seprent indicates the real position (at the moment).
The [rate] control on the left sets the speed of changes.
Uncheck [go] to freeze the morphstate. (note: the instant morphstate won't be captured in a preset, only the set limits are saved)
(hint: you still may want to freeze the sound while editing a preset)
Check [hand] to advance the random morph manually with ModWheel.
The 9 main controls:
- [mix] and [wave] set the base of sound. You can do huge variety of timbres - from warm analog to harsh FM-ish - with just these two! (did I say that this synth's ToneGen is absolutely special?)
- [mod]: add thickness or crazyness to the sound
- [sweep]: the filter sweep, amount and rate in one control.
- [Q]: filter Q (resonance)
- [init]: the initial filter cutoff freq (before attack)
- [peak]: the peak filter cutoff freq (after attack, before decay). Note that it may be lower than "init" (thus you get inverted envelope)
- [att] - attack sharpness + chiff click (up: shorter and sharper, dn: slower)
- [decay] - filter decay time (from "peak" back to "init")
(note: the amp envelope has no controls - it figures out the proper params out of other controls)
Q: I just froze the morph, but the sound still somehow changes
A: mind the filter sweep - it goes up and down, while its amount and rate stays frozen.
Chord Recognition
Press a 3-noted chord - and MoarF:
1) updates the arp to these 3 notes
2) detects the keynote - and transposes the bassline to fit the key (considering the difference between major/minor/whatever key).
This key will last until next valid chord pressed. You may play melodies to it.
Q: what chords are valid?
A: any 3-notes chords, including nonregular ones (MoarF is designed to do the best detecting the key out of any of them). Meanwhile, too close taken notes are not valid (so you may play glissandos etc).
Q: but what if I press a 4-noted chord?
A: only the 3 last keys pressed are considered
Hint: if you badly need to take a, for example, G7-chord - hit the F-key a short moment earlier than the rest (G, B, D keys) - so MoarF detects the chord as Gmajor (which is the parent to G7).
Start/Stop, Sync, Tempo
When you start the sequencer ([run]), it whether:
- plays immediately (sync2: none)
- waits until the next bar start (sync2: bar)
- waits until a chord pressed (sync2: chord)
Bar starts and tempo come from your host, you set BPM divider with [seq rate] switch.
You can mute/unmute bass and arp staying in sync ([bass], [arp]). On stop, two additional buttons appear, suited to on/off bass and arp fed to MoarF's tonegen, while still outputting the midi stream. This is to use MoarF as a midi processor.
Arpeggiator
It is pretty intuitive, you see how it works. Just check the boxes.
You may set velocity and length of the notes with [velo] and [leng] sliders. Max length makes close notes stuck together.
Arpeggiator plays exactly the 3 keys you pressed, but you may send them an octave up/dn with the [octarp] switch.
Bassline
Edit the melody in C key, no matter what chord is it. (note: these are analog inputs, make sure you drag 'em so the switch is done)
- blue mark denotes the major/minor dependant tertia (other types of chords being supported with this feature as well)
- unmarked keyboard means "same note continues"
- faded keyboard denotes a pause
Bassline is always transposed to fit the "bass window", you may move this window using the [range] slider.
Other Controls
[octave] - overall transposition
[split @key...] - use it to split your keyboard so the lower octaves are for the chord input only, upper for solo.
Type in the key number (middle C is 60, one octave higher is 72 etc)
(note: when the keyboard is split, arp is transposed 1 additional octave up)
[porta] - portamento time (for legato notes)
[delay] - cross-delay amount
[sfx1] - mix between random pan (low) and chorus-flanger (high)
[sfx2] - time shift (stereo enhancer)
Special Notes
1) This synth introduces "polyphonic vibrato", i.e vibrato tied to a particular voice not to entire tonegen. This allows applying vibrato to solo only, not bass/arp. So, dependant on voice stealing case, a note may inherit vibrato from previous note or may not. I found this not to be of a problem but rather of a cool feature. Once you have your modwheel handy (you do if you play with vibrato), you do control and make use of this effect. But let me know what you think about this technic.
2) SE-related: I always try to use as little external modules as possible, to save some CPU and loading time. So here I come with only two: RJ_voxno by Rick Jelliffe and DH_Midimunger by Dave Haupt. Thanks!
MIDI Specs
Bassline midi out chan: #9
Arp (chord) midi out chan: #8
controllers:
#1 (ModWheel) - vibrato depth (nand: off) / morph advance (nand: on)
#5 - porta time
#8 - arp velo
#9 - bass velo
#80 - morph go (un/freeze)
#81 - arp un/mute
#82 - bass un/mute
#91 - delay amount
#127 (or 126/127) - seq start/stop
Aftertouch: vibrato depth (nand: off)
To-Do List
- random octave option for arpeggiator
- "instant halve" control
- morphstate snapshot feature
- GUI improvements
- moar presets
- a build on SE 1.1
Questions, comments, suggestions, presets, anything else:
inFo@Fsynthz.com