Humusprivate beta

2. Making sound

Goal: meet the instruments that make Humus sound like itself, put them through an effect chain worth keeping, and keep the levels in hand.

You leave with: two chip synths mixed through a delay and a shimmer reverb, a preset of your own on each, and the patch playing in a scale you chose.

The instruments

Not all nineteen. The ones that teach something:

  • Acid - the mono acid-box line, accent and slide. You met it in lesson 1.
  • Grit - a console sound chip, with a cartridge slot for expansion chips.
  • Silt - the three-voice home-computer chip through its emulation core.
  • pH - FM in four engines, including a six-operator one that reads .syx banks.
  • Rhizome - six voices stacked in scale degrees of the patch's tuning.
  • Wave - a wavetable you draw, grow from a seed file, or roll.
  • Sampler - eight slots, zone maps, sound banks, and it records off the patch.
  • Substrate and Mineral - a drone of stacked saws, and struck partials on a lattice, for the pads and the bells.

The effects

Three that cover most of the ground: Fern, an echo whose repeats thin and darken; Verbatim, a reverb built from a recorded space you load; Bloom, a shimmer reverb with a pitch shifter in its tank. The spectral family - Prism, Halogen, SpectralFreeze - is for later.

Levels

Three sources into one SoundOut get loud fast. A Mixer or a Console gives each source a fader, a Compressor holds a busy part together, and a VuMeter or a Spectrum shows what is really coming out. While you experiment, the Master Limiter on the transport keeps the output from clipping.

The scale everything plays in

Pitch is patch-wide by default. A Tuning organism makes no sound: it is the scale, and every instrument that turns a note into a frequency asks it. Leave it unwired and the whole patch follows it: equal temperaments, just intonation, the overtone series or any .scl scale file. Cord its MIDI outlet into one instrument and only that one follows; the tuning flows on down the MIDI cords, so two Tuning organisms put two synths in two scales at once.

Steps

  1. Grit into SoundOut. Play it from the keyboard. Change its Cartridge and hear the chip change character.
  2. Roll it. Press the dice on its bar a few times. The history arrow steps back to the one you liked.
  3. Fern after it. Set the time in beats so the echo locks to tempo.
  4. Bloom after Fern. Turn the shimmer up until the chip sounds like a choir.
  5. Silt beside Grit. Put a Mixer in front of Fern and give each chip a channel. Two chips, one keyboard: the focused editor is the one that plays.
  6. Watch the level. Cord Bloom into a VuMeter as well as SoundOut, and turn on the Master Limiter for the loud moments.
  7. Sampler. Drop a sound file on a slot and play it across the keys.
  8. Tuning. Add a Tuning organism, leave it unwired, pick Just - 5-limit. Add a Rhizome and play a fifth: it locks. Then cord the Tuning into Silt alone, and Silt plays just while Grit stays equal-tempered.
  9. Save a preset on each so lesson 3 can call them up.

Shot list

  1. Grit alone, keys, the raw chip, then the cartridge swapped. Voice: "This is what the console had."
  2. The dice three times, the history arrow back to the second.
  3. Fern's time set in beats, the repeats falling on the grid.
  4. Bloom's shimmer rising, the chip turning to glass.
  5. The Mixer dropped in, Silt on its own channel, focus moving between editors.
  6. The VuMeter jumping, the limiter catching a peak.
  7. A file dropped on the Sampler, played across two octaves.
  8. Tuning added and left unwired, a fifth held on Rhizome; then its cord landing on Silt alone.
  9. A preset saved on each, the names visible.

Go deeper

  • The help page of each organism named here, from the ? on its bar.
  • Plugins: your own plugins sit in the organism list next to these and take the same cords.