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Voltaic Instructions

Introduction

Three oscillators, a noise source, four envelopes, two LFOs, a filter with eighteen modes, and reverb, chorus delay and phaser on the end of it. That is the specification. What it plays like comes down to two things.

The first is that every oscillator is really three oscillators. Left on sine, triangle, sawtooth or pulse it is the analog machine you expect — hard sync, pulse width modulation, and its own unison stack of up to seven detuned copies. Switch it to WT and it becomes a wavetable oscillator with two independent axes under your hands: MORPH travels through the table, WARP reshapes whatever it finds there. Twenty-seven tables, ten warps, every combination fair game. Both axes take an envelope, either LFO, aftertouch or the modulation wheel, so nothing has to sit still.

Switch it to MODAL and it stops being an oscillator at all. There is no waveform. The note is a struck object: a bank of tuned resonances that you hit once and then listen to as it rings down. Six bodies — a warm low tone, a piano-like string, a Rhodes tine, a marimba bar, a church bell and something glassy — with decays from a short tap out to eleven seconds, and a strike position that decides which parts of the body you excite and which you miss entirely. Play harder and it does not just get louder, it gets brighter, the way a real mallet does.

The second is that the clean things stay clean. Every waveform is bandlimited, and the warps that are meant to be musical are computed into those bandlimited tables rather than smeared across the output — so you can sync, fold, ring modulate and saturate a wavetable at the top of the keyboard and it does not grit up on you. The three warps that are meant to sound like broken digital hardware are applied live instead, on purpose.

The filter is really five filters behind one menu: the original multimode ladder, a zero-delay transistor ladder that compresses where others scream, a state-variable circuit in the Oberheim mould that leaves the low end alone, a three-pole acid design that hollows out and turns nastier the harder the resonance is pushed, and a modal resonator bank — the same tuned body the MODAL oscillator strikes, but driven continuously by whatever the oscillators and the noise source are playing.

Velocity, aftertouch and the modulation wheel route to cutoff, resonance, amplitude, vibrato, LFO rate and depth, unison width and both wavetable axes. The sub oscillator can be mixed in straight, or used to ring modulate, amplitude modulate or phase modulate the two main oscillators. A step sequencer and arpeggiator are built in for melodic patterns.

The main sections are selected via the tab buttons along the top of the interface:

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GEN — master gain, jitter, preset handling and MIDI learn.
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EG — the four envelope generators.
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OSC1, OSC2 — the two main oscillators.
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SUB — the sub oscillator and its modulation routings.
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NOISE — the noise source.
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FILT — filter mode, cutoff and resonance.
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LFO — the two low frequency oscillators.
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SEQ — step sequencer and arpeggiator.
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FX — phaser, chorus delay and reverb.
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RTE — routing of velocity, aftertouch, modulation wheel and key position.

Several sections have subsections selected by the PAGE menu inside the section. OSC1 and OSC2 have OSC, PWM, WT, UNI and MODAL pages; SUB has an additional MOD page. The LFO section has LFO1 and LFO2 pages, the RTE section has VEL, AT, MW and KEY pages, and the FX section has one page per effect.

General controls:

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Double tap on a knob resets it to its initial value.
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Tap on the label of a knob opens a text input field for direct value entry.

General

The GEN section holds the global controls.

GAIN sets the final output level of the synthesizer in decibels.

JITTER sets the base vibrato depth in cents. It gives every voice a small amount of independent pitch drift, which keeps stacked voices from sounding mathematically identical, and it is also the depth that the aftertouch and modulation wheel vibrato routings scale.

LOAD PRESET and SAVE PRESET manage presets, MIDI LEARN enters controller assignment mode, and CLEAR SYNTH resets all parameters to their initial values.

Oscillators

Voltaic has two main oscillators (OSC1, OSC2) and one sub oscillator (SUB). Each oscillator section is divided into pages accessed via the PAGE menu: OSC, PWM, WT, UNI and MODAL, with SUB offering an additional MOD page.

OSC Page

WAVE selects the waveform: SINE, TRI, SAW, PULSE, WT or MODAL. The PULSE waveform enables pulse width modulation on the PWM page; the WT waveform enables the wavetable engine on the WT page; MODAL replaces the oscillator with the struck resonator described on the MODAL page.

AMP EG selects which envelope generator controls the amplitude of the oscillator.

GAIN sets the output level of the oscillator.

COARSE sets the pitch in semitones relative to the played note.

FINE sets the pitch in cents for detuning.

TUNE EG selects which envelope generator modulates the pitch of the oscillator. Set it to NONE for a static detune — otherwise the detune follows the envelope.

SYNC enables hard sync. When active, the oscillator is locked to the base note frequency and forced to restart its waveform on every cycle of that master frequency. The oscillator still runs at its own pitch set by COARSE, FINE, and TUNE EG — but the forced restart shapes the sound into a bright, cutting timbre that changes character as the oscillator pitch is adjusted. Tuning the oscillator higher produces a brighter sound. Sweeping the pitch with TUNE EG creates the classic sync sweep — a rising or falling tonal movement heard in many lead synthesizer sounds.

PWM Page

Pulse width modulation is active when the oscillator waveform is set to PULSE.

PW sets the base pulse width. At 0 the waveform is a square wave (50% duty cycle). At 1 it is a narrow pulse (5% duty cycle). The full knob range covers the perceptually distinct half of the pulse width range, as both halves of the duty cycle produce mirror-image spectra that sound identical.

PW EG selects which envelope generator modulates the pulse width.

PWM sets the target pulse width that the envelope sweeps toward. The envelope interpolates from the PW value at note-on to the PWM value as the envelope rises. Setting PW to 1 (narrow) and PWM to 0 (square) causes the envelope to open the sound from thin and buzzy toward a fuller square wave. Reversing the settings causes the opposite sweep.

WT Page — the Wavetable Oscillator

Setting WAVE to WT turns the oscillator into a wavetable oscillator. Instead of one fixed shape, the oscillator reads its waveform from a three-dimensional space, and the two dimensions you control can be modulated continuously while a note sounds.

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TABLE selects which of the 27 wavetables is used. Each table is a family of eight related waveforms, arranged so that moving through them is a smooth timbral journey rather than a set of unrelated snapshots.
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MORPH is the position inside that table. At 0 you hear the first waveform of the family, at 1 the last, and in between the shapes are blended continuously.
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WARP applies a waveshaping transform on top — sync, phase bend, ring modulation, folding, saturation, quantization and more. This is a second, independent axis: any warp works on any table at any morph position.

The third dimension is handled automatically. For every combination of morph and warp the synth keeps a set of bandlimited versions and picks the right one for the pitch being played, so the wavetable stays clean and alias-free across the whole keyboard — even with the more aggressive warps engaged.

The display at the top of the page always shows the waveform that is actually sounding, including the current morph position and warp amount.

The A and B faders. MORPH and WARP each have a pair of vertical faders labelled A and B. A is the base value — where the parameter sits with no modulation. B is the target that modulation sweeps toward. An envelope, LFO, aftertouch or modulation wheel signal moves the parameter from A toward B as it rises. Setting B lower than A inverts the sweep, so the value falls as the modulation rises. With B at its maximum (the default) modulation simply opens the parameter up in the familiar way.

MORPH EG and WARP EG select which envelope generator drives each axis, or OFF for no envelope. Both axes can also be targeted by either LFO (destinations MORPH1–3 and WARP1–3), and by aftertouch and the modulation wheel in the RTE section. A slow LFO on MORPH is the quickest way to get an evolving pad; an envelope on WARP gives a per-note timbral attack.

The Wavetables

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BASIC — sine to sawtooth to square. The general-purpose starting point.
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CLIMB — harmonics added one by one, from a pure sine to a full sawtooth.
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ODD — odd harmonics only, sine to square. Hollow and clarinet-like.
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FORMANT — a resonant peak sweeping up the spectrum over a thin buzz. A vocal wah.
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VOWEL — three formants morphing through ah, eh, ee, oh, oo.
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METAL — sparse bell-like partials that fan apart across the morph.
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PULSE — rectangular wave, duty cycle from 50% down to a thin pulse.
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SOFT — sine to triangle to a dark sawtooth. The mellow, round table; a good bass and sub choice.
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ORGAN — additive drawbar registrations, upper drawbars swelling in.
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FIFTHS — a root sawtooth with a second sawtooth a twelfth above swelling in. Power chords from one oscillator.
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GROWL — two formants sweeping apart over a sawtooth. Aggressive and animated.
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CHIME — octave-spaced partials. Glassy bell tones.
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DIGITAL — a different pseudo-random spectrum on every frame. Restless and electronic.
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FM — a genuine two-operator FM spectrum at a 1:1 ratio, the morph raising the FM index.
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COMB — a sawtooth through resonant comb peaks whose spacing changes. Flanger-like and metallic.
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SHAPER — emphasis on the even harmonics. Tube-like warmth with an octave-up character.
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SWEEP — a single narrow partial travelling up the spectrum. A pure whistle.
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HOLLOW — every third harmonic only. Nasal and reedy.
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AIR — a wide high-frequency band rising across the morph. Breathy and thin.
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NOISE — random harmonic amplitudes and random phases, with the morph tilting the spectrum from dark to bright. Textural and breathy rather than tonal.
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CZ RES — a falling-saw window over a resonant sine that sweeps upward. The classic phase-distortion resonance.
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FM2 — two-operator FM at a 3:1 ratio. Clangy and metallic, between FM and EPIANO.
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PLUCK — a plucked-string spectrum with the pluck point moving toward the bridge across the morph.
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RESO — a sawtooth through a resonant lowpass whose cutoff opens across the morph.
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BUZZ — a flat-spectrum impulse train, brighter and brassier than CLIMB.
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EPIANO — FM electric piano: a body tone plus a tine cluster that the morph brings in.
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STACK — root, octave and two-octave sawtooths stacked as the morph rises. Dense and modern.

Warp Modes

WARP reshapes whichever waveform the table and morph produce. The first group is computed into the bandlimited tables themselves and stays completely alias-free, however hard it is driven:

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SYNC — reads the cycle faster and wraps it, up to seven times per note cycle. A hard-sync edge without a second oscillator; sweep it for the classic sync sound.
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BEND — phase distortion toward a breakpoint, in the manner of the Casio CZ series. Turns soft shapes progressively sharper.
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RING — ring modulation against a harmonic of the cycle. Adds metallic sidebands and turns tonal tables inharmonic.
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FOLD — a wavefolder. Overdrives the waveform and reflects it back on itself, adding harmonics without simply clipping.
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FORMANT — reads the cycle faster but holds at the end instead of wrapping. This shifts the formants upward while leaving the pitch alone, and without the buzz that SYNC adds — the natural partner for the VOWEL, FORMANT and GROWL tables.
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SAT — hard-clipping drive. Squares the shape off and thickens it.
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STEP — a staircase quantization locked to the waveform cycle. Lo-fi character that stays clean at any pitch.

The second group is applied live to the oscillator output. These deliberately produce the broadband digital grit that a bandlimited table cannot contain, which is exactly what makes them sound the way they do:

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BITS — amplitude quantization, from 32 levels down to 1. Classic bitcrushing.
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RATE — sample and hold decimation, down to a small fraction of the sample rate.
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DRIVE — hard clipping applied at the output, grittier than the baked SAT.

UNI Page — Unison

Each oscillator can stack detuned copies of itself. Unison works with every waveform, analog and wavetable alike. It has no effect on MODAL, where detuned copies of a struck body would beat against each other rather than thicken.

VOICES sets how many copies are stacked, from 1 to 7. At 1 unison is off and costs nothing.

DETUNE spreads the copies apart in pitch. Small amounts thicken, larger amounts give the wide, shimmering supersaw character.

BLEND sets the level of the outer copies relative to the centre voice. Lower values keep the original pitch dominant, higher values give an even, chorused spread.

Setting WAVE to MODAL replaces the oscillator with a physical model of a struck object. Nothing here produces a waveform in the usual sense. Instead the note is a set of tuned resonances — the same thing a bell, a bar, a plate or a piano string actually is — which are hit once when the key goes down and then simply ring and fade. Everything you hear afterwards is the body decaying.

That has two consequences worth knowing before you patch it. The note fades on its own whether or not you hold the key, so DECAY here does the job the amplitude envelope normally does. And because a struck object has no sustaining excitation, the amplitude envelope should usually be set out of the way — SUSTAIN at maximum and a long RELEASE — or it will cut the tail short before the body has finished ringing. Think of the envelope as the damper rather than the shape of the note.

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BODY selects which object is struck. This is the single most important control here: what identifies an instrument to the ear is where its resonances sit, not how loud they are, so changing BODY changes the instrument rather than the tone colour.
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DECAY is how long the body rings, from 0.03 seconds to 8. Each body scales this differently — a marimba bar is short by nature and a glass tone is long — so the same setting gives roughly 4 seconds on WOOD and 11 on GLASS.
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BRIGHT tilts the balance between low and high resonances at the moment of the strike. Low settings are dark and flute-like, high settings ring bell-like and glassy.
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MALLET is the hardness of what strikes the body. A soft mallet stays in contact longer and never delivers energy to the high resonances at all; a hard one is closer to an instantaneous tap and excites everything. Velocity adds to this setting, so playing harder opens the top of the sound up rather than only raising the level.
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STRIKE is where the body is hit. A resonance with a node exactly at the striking point cannot be excited, so this control silences some parts of the body and emphasises others. Striking dead centre cancels every even resonance, which is most of why a centre-struck bar sounds hollow.

The six bodies. They are ordered from dark and low to bright and high, so neighbouring entries are relatives and moving through the list is a gradual change of instrument.

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DEEP — few resonances, warm, and very long. The closest this oscillator comes to a sustained tone.
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STRING — a harmonic series with the slight stretch a real piano string has, and many resonances. Piano-like.
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TINE — the fourth resonance sits slightly sharp, which is most of what makes a Rhodes tine sound like a tine and not like a piano.
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WOOD — the classic marimba bar tuning, only a few resonances, and the high ones die quickly. Short and percussive.
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BELL — genuine church bell resonances including the minor third that is why bells always sound faintly sad. The one to reach for first, because it sounds least like a synthesizer.
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GLASS — sparse and strongly inharmonic, sitting above everything else, and the longest ringing of the six.

Every note is struck slightly differently, so repeated notes vary in timbre the way a real instrument does rather than repeating identically.

What MODAL ignores. Unison, hard sync and phase modulation have no meaning for a struck body — there is no running waveform for them to act on — and are simply inactive. Pitch works normally: COARSE, FINE, the tuning envelope, vibrato and the pitch LFO all retune the body while it rings, without a click. Ring modulation and amplitude modulation from the sub oscillator work as usual, since they act on the output.

What can be modulated while a note rings. DECAY, and only DECAY. Once the body has been hit, BODY, BRIGHT, MALLET and STRIKE describe a blow that has already happened — turning them changes the next note, not the one you are holding. This is not a limitation of the implementation; it is what striking something means. DECAY is different because it describes how the body loses energy from here on, so it can be shortened or lengthened mid-note without a click, and it is the one control here with modulation routes of its own.

Those routes live on the ROUTE page. KEY → DECAY makes high notes die faster, which every struck instrument does and which a synthesizer has to be told to do — it is set to a moderate amount by default rather than off, because one decay time across the whole keyboard sounds artificial at the top. AT and MW → DAMP shorten the tail as you press, which is a hand laid on the strings: unlike most routes in VOLTAIC these subtract from the knob rather than being pushed up to it, so the DECAY setting is the undamped body and the controller only ever mutes.

MODAL is also available as a filter mode, where the same bodies are driven continuously by the mix instead of struck once. See Filter Modes below.

MOD Page — Sub Oscillator Routing

The SUB section has an extra MOD page holding four independent routing toggles. Any combination can be active at once, and their results are mixed.

NORMAL adds the sub oscillator directly to the signal path.

RINGMOD ring modulates the two main oscillators with the sub oscillator, producing the sum and difference frequencies and a bell-like, inharmonic result.

AM applies amplitude modulation instead, which keeps the original signal present alongside the sidebands. AM DEPTH sets the amount.

PM uses the sub oscillator to phase modulate the main oscillators — through-zero phase modulation, which is the same synthesis principle as FM. PM DEPTH sets the modulation index. Tuning the sub with COARSE and FINE sets the ratio and therefore the character, from bell tones at wide intervals to growling basses at unison and octave settings. PM applies to the analog waveforms; a main oscillator set to WT or MODAL is left unmodulated.

Noise

The NOISE section adds a per-voice noise source, mixed in before the filter so the filter shapes it along with the oscillators.

MODE selects OFF, WHITE, PINK or BROWN. White is flat and bright, pink falls at 3 dB per octave and sits naturally behind most sounds, brown falls faster again and is useful as a low rumble.

AMP EG selects which envelope generator controls the noise level — a short envelope here adds breath or a percussive chiff to the attack.

GAIN sets the noise level in decibels.

Filter

The FILT section offers eighteen filter modes drawn from five different filter designs. All of them follow the played note by default, and how closely they do so is set by FILT on the KEY routing page.

MODE selects the filter type — see the list below.

CUT sets the filter cutoff frequency. In MODAL mode it sets the pitch the resonator is tuned to instead. Both are measured from the played note, or from a fixed reference if you turn FILT down on the KEY routing page.

RES sets the resonance. At the top of its range the ladder, state-variable and acid filters self-oscillate. In MODAL mode it sets how long the resonator rings.

BODY and STRIKE apply to MODAL only, and do nothing in the other seventeen modes. They select which resonator is used and where it is excited, exactly as on the oscillator MODAL page.

One difference is worth knowing if you have read the MODAL oscillator page. There, everything except DECAY is fixed at the moment the body is struck. Here the body is never struck — it is driven continuously — so STRIKE keeps working while the note sounds, and it is available as an LFO destination under the name STRIKE. Sweeping it slowly moves which parts of the body the incoming sound is able to excite, which is a movement no filter cutoff can imitate. BODY still swaps the instrument outright and is not a modulation target.

The other control worth knowing about is not in this section at all. By default the resonator is retuned to every note you play, which no real body does. FILT on the KEY routing page is what turns that off, leaving a fixed body with the notes moving through it — which is what makes MODAL sound like an instrument being played rather than a filter being swept.

CUT EG selects which envelope generator modulates the cutoff frequency, or NONE for a static cutoff.

RES EG selects which envelope generator modulates the resonance. Combining a slow resonance envelope with a faster cutoff envelope produces sweeps that change character as they move, which a single envelope cannot do.

Filter Modes

LP4, LP2, BP2, BP4, HP2, HP4, NOTCH — the original Voltaic filter, a Moog-style ladder with multimode outputs. LP4 is the default 24 dB per octave lowpass; the others tap the same ladder for 12 dB lowpass, bandpass, highpass and notch responses.

LADDER LP, LADDER BP, LADDER HP — a zero-delay-feedback four-pole transistor ladder with a saturating feedback path, oversampled twice. Compared to the original it is cleaner under fast modulation, compresses musically instead of screaming when pushed, and self-oscillates smoothly at full resonance. LADDER LP is the 24 dB lowpass, LADDER BP the bandpass and LADDER HP the highpass tap.

SEM LP, SEM BP, SEM HP, SEM NOTCH — a two-pole state-variable filter in the manner of the Oberheim SEM. Smoother and more vocal than a ladder, and it does not thicken the low end the way a ladder does, which makes it the better choice for pads and for anything that has to stay clear in a mix. SEM NOTCH is the notch response the SEM is known for: a null that hollows the sound out, and something quite different again when the cutoff is swept.

303 LP, 303 BP, 303 HP — a three-pole acid ladder voiced after the TB-303. The 18 dB per octave slope leaves far more harmonic content above the cutoff than a four-pole does, which is what the resonance then screams against. There is no bass compensation and a highpass sits in the resonance path, so the sound hollows out and gets nastier as resonance rises — the squelch. Resonance also loses some grip as the cutoff closes, exactly as it does on the original instrument.

MODAL — a modal resonator bank, the same tuned body the MODAL oscillator strikes, but driven continuously by whatever the oscillators and the noise source are feeding it. This is not a filter in the usual sense and its two main controls change meaning: CUT is the pitch the body is tuned to, and RES is how long it rings. At CUT maximum the body sits exactly on the note being played; turning CUT down walks it as much as three octaves below, which reads as a bigger, darker object. RES runs from a short body to a long one.

Because CUT is a tuning rather than a corner frequency, a cutoff envelope sweeps the pitch of the body, not its brightness — a very different gesture from a lowpass sweep, and worth hearing before you assume a patch will translate. BODY and STRIKE work exactly as they do on the oscillator page.

The source you feed it matters more than with any other mode. A resonator only responds to whatever falls inside its narrow resonances, so the noise source excites the whole body evenly and is the natural partner here — turn NOISE up. A sawtooth concentrates its energy into narrow harmonics instead, so as CUT moves the body drifts in and out of alignment with it and the level changes with it; that is resonance behaving correctly rather than a fault, but it is why the two inharmonic bodies, BELL and GLASS, need noise to speak properly. There is no strike here: the body is only ever driven, never hit.

Envelope Generators

Four envelope generators (EG1–EG4) are available. Each has ATTACK, DECAY, SUSTAIN, and RELEASE stages. Any of the four EGs can be assigned independently to oscillator amplitude, oscillator pitch, pulse width, wavetable morph and warp, noise level, filter cutoff and filter resonance.

LFOs

Two low frequency oscillators are available on the LFO1 and LFO2 pages of the LFO section.

CPS sets the LFO rate in Hertz, from 0.01 to 20.

DEPTH sets the modulation amount.

WAVE selects the LFO waveform: SIN, TRI, SAW or SQR.

DEST selects the modulation destination:

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PITCH — scales the oscillator tuning offset, for vibrato. Requires a non-zero COARSE or FINE detune to have something to scale.
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FILT — filter cutoff.
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AMP — output amplitude, for tremolo.
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PW1, PW2, PW3 — pulse width of the respective oscillator.
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RES — filter resonance.
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MORPH1, MORPH2, MORPH3 — wavetable morph position of the respective oscillator.
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WARP1, WARP2, WARP3 — wavetable warp amount of the respective oscillator.
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UNI1, UNI2, UNI3 — unison detune of the respective oscillator. The DETUNE knob sets the narrowest point and the LFO widens the stack from there, so a slow LFO makes it breathe. Requires VOICES above 1 on that oscillator.
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STRIKE — strike position of the MODAL filter. The knob sets the closest point to the edge and the LFO moves inward from there, changing which parts of the resonating body the incoming sound can excite. Requires the filter to be in MODAL mode.

Both LFOs can target the same destination, in which case their effects combine. LFO rate and depth can themselves be modulated by aftertouch and the modulation wheel from the RTE section.

Routing

The RTE section maps MIDI performance data to synthesis parameters. It is divided into four pages: VEL (velocity), AT (aftertouch), MW (modulation wheel) and KEY (the pitch of the note itself).

VEL Page

FILT routes note velocity to filter cutoff. Higher velocity opens the filter further.

AMP routes note velocity to output amplitude.

RES routes note velocity to filter resonance.

AT Page

Both channel pressure and polyphonic aftertouch are supported. With polyphonic aftertouch each voice responds to its own pressure independently.

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FILT — filter cutoff.
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AMP — output amplitude.
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VIB — vibrato depth, scaling the JITTER amount set in the GEN section.
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RES — filter resonance.
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LFORT — LFO rate, for pressure-dependent vibrato speed.
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LFODEP — LFO depth, the usual way to fade vibrato in with pressure.
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WARP — wavetable warp amount on all wavetable oscillators.
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MORPH — wavetable morph position on all wavetable oscillators.
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UNI — unison detune on all three oscillators, widening the stack as pressure rises.
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DAMP — shortens the decay of any oscillator set to MODAL, as though you were laying a hand on the strings. This one subtracts rather than adds: at zero pressure the DECAY knob is what you hear, and pressing takes the tail away.

MW Page

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FILT — filter cutoff.
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VIB — vibrato depth.
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RES — filter resonance.
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LFORT — LFO rate.
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LFODEP — LFO depth.
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MORPH — wavetable morph position.
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WARP — wavetable warp amount.
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UNI — unison detune, for spreading a stacked sound wider as the wheel comes up.
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DAMP — shortens the decay of any oscillator set to MODAL, the same damping the AT page offers but under the wheel instead.

The morph and warp routings move the parameter from its A value toward its B value on the WT page, so the fader pair there defines the range the wheel sweeps through.

KEY Page

This page routes the pitch of the played note. Unlike velocity, aftertouch and the wheel, it is not something you perform — it is a law applied across the keyboard.

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FILT — how closely the filter cutoff follows the played note. This one starts at maximum rather than at zero, because tracking the note is what the filter has always done and the fader only ever takes that away. At the top the cutoff moves octave for octave with the keyboard, which is what keeps a patch sounding consistent as you play up it. At the bottom the cutoff stops moving altogether and stays where CUT puts it, so the same band is emphasised whatever you play — a formant rather than a filter, and the way a voice or an acoustic body behaves. Intermediate settings move the cutoff by a fraction of the distance the note moves.
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DECAY — makes high notes ring for less time than low ones on any oscillator set to MODAL. Every struck instrument behaves this way: a piano's top octave dies almost immediately while its bass strings ring for many seconds. A synthesizer has to be told to do it, so unlike every other routing in this section this one is set to a moderate amount by default rather than off. At the maximum setting the decay halves for every octave you play upward and doubles for every octave down, taking middle C as the pivot.

FILT is worth a paragraph of its own if you use the MODAL filter mode, because it is what decides whether the resonating body is part of the instrument or part of the note. At full tracking the body is retuned to every note you play, which is a sound no acoustic instrument makes. Turn it down and the body stops moving: the notes pass through a fixed resonance instead, which is how a guitar, a piano and a voice are actually built — one body, many pitches. The same fader sets where the cutoff sits for every other filter mode too, so a patch that uses it will behave consistently if you switch modes.

Effects

Each effect has a power button to activate or deactivate it. The power state is saved with the preset and reported to the DAW host.

Reverb

An algorithmic reverb with controls for mix, gain, feedback, and damping.

Chorus Delay

A stereo chorus delay with modulation. DEL sets the delay time, FB sets feedback, MIX blends dry and wet signal. MOD RATE and MOD DEPTH control the modulation LFO applied to the delay time, producing chorus and flanger effects at short delay times.

Phaser

An all-pass phaser applied per note. Each note has its own independent phaser instance, so polyphonic playing produces rich, non-correlated phasing. RANGE sets the sweep range. FB controls feedback for more pronounced notches. RATE sets the frequency of the phaser's LFO, which sweeps the center frequency of the all-pass filters.

Sequencer and Arpeggiator

The SEQ section combines a step sequencer with an arpeggiator. Both share the same timing engine and operate simultaneously — the sequencer determines which notes play, and the arpeggiator transposes each of those notes through a set of intervals.

Timing

BPM sets the internal tempo from 10 to 960 BPM.

TIME DIV sets the duration of each step as a fraction of one beat: 1/64, 1/32, 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1, 2, or 4 beats per step.

SYNC DAW replaces the internal BPM with the host DAW tempo when running as a plugin.

SWING shifts the timing of alternating steps. At 0 all steps are evenly spaced. Increasing SWING shortens the duration of even steps and lengthens odd steps, creating a shuffled rhythmic feel.

GAIN sets the output level of the sequencer in decibels.

Recording Notes

The sequencer stores a list of notes, each with a pitch, duration, and velocity. Notes are recorded by playing them on a MIDI keyboard while LEARN is active. Each note-on and note-off pair becomes one step, capturing the exact duration the key was held. When LEARN is off the sequence plays untouched and incoming MIDI notes only trigger the synth normally.

LEARNMODE selects how notes are recorded. In APPEND mode, notes are always added to the sequence. If the count exceeds STEPS, the oldest notes are dropped from the front at the next cycle boundary. In REPLACE mode, notes are appended until the sequence reaches STEPS steps. Once full, each new note overwrites the step that was playing at the moment the key was pressed, allowing targeted replacement of individual steps while the sequence runs.

STEPS sets the maximum length of the sequence.

REEINIT NOTES, when active, plays each step using the pitch and duration from the recorded note but re-initialises it with the current synth parameter settings on every tick. This allows the sound of existing steps to be reshaped without re-recording them.

ZERONOTE inserts a silent rest step into the sequence at the current position. Useful for adding gaps between notes without re-recording the whole sequence.

CLEAR flushes all recorded steps and resets the sequencer and arpeggiator position to the beginning.

DON'T IMPORT NOTES — when loading a preset, the stored note sequence is skipped and the current sequence is preserved. Only the synth parameters are restored.

WAIT FOR ZERO holds any parameter changes until the sequence returns to step 0, keeping transitions in sync with the loop boundary.

Arpeggiator

MODE selects the arpeggiator direction. When set to OFF the arpeggiator is inactive and each sequencer step plays at its recorded pitch. The available modes are:

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UP — steps through the arp intervals from lowest to highest, then restarts and advances to the next sequencer step.
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DOWN — steps from highest to lowest, then restarts.
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UP/DOWN — ascends to the top, then descends back to the bottom before advancing to the next sequencer step.
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BOUNCE — ascends to the top and reverses direction, bouncing back and forth without repeating the top or bottom note at the turnaround.

ARP STEPS sets how many arp intervals are cycled before the sequencer advances to the next note. Range is 1 to 32.

Steps 1 through 32 each define the interval in semitones from the previous arp step. Step 1 sets the offset from the played note (0 = unison). Step 2 sets the interval from step 1. Step 3 sets the interval from step 2, and so on. This means the arp builds intervals cumulatively: if step 1 is 0 and step 2 is 7, the second note is a perfect fifth above the played note. If step 3 is 5, the third note is a perfect fourth above step 2, landing an octave above the played note.

Negative semitone values move downward, allowing descending or mixed-direction interval patterns independent of the arpeggiator direction mode.

MIDI Learn

MIDI learn is available for controls that affect the sound. Press the MIDI LEARN button to enter learning mode, then touch the control to be assigned and move a controller or touch a button on your MIDI device. Control Change messages are assigned for knobs. All other parameters are assigned to Note On messages.

Presets

Presets are saved and loaded via the preset buttons in the GEN section. The current state of all parameters is stored, including effect power states and MIDI-learned assignments.

The preset list starts with Default, which restores every parameter to its initial value, followed by the factory presets. These cover the range of the instrument — unison leads, the three resonant filter characters, the wavetable tables and warps, phase modulation basses and evolving pads — and are a good place to start when exploring a part of the synth for the first time. Your own saved presets appear below them, most recent first. Factory presets cannot be overwritten or deleted.