Patch Archetypes

Patch Archetypes

The factory bank is sixteen patches, each built to demonstrate one part of the instrument. They are deliberately plain — this is a reference set, not a sound library.

Every patch is levelled to within about a decibel of −22 dBFS, measured over its loudest 300 ms, with headroom for a six-note chord. Whole-render RMS is not used, because a pluck that decays in 200 ms and a pad that holds for three seconds can sit equally loud under the hand and still read twenty decibels apart.

Patch	Demonstrates
Strings	unison, chorus, a slow filter envelope
Pad	a tempo-synced LFO on the cutoff, long everything
Solo Lead	monophonic play with portamento, and the delay in ping-pong
Bass	the sub oscillator and a fast filter envelope, dry
Pluck	a short decay with heavy key tracking, and velocity
Bells	FM, with the modulation envelope driving the FM amount
Organ	the sub oscillator as a drawbar, full sustain, no envelope
Brass	a filter envelope with an attack on it, and the equaliser
Arp	the arpeggiator: up and down, two octaves, sixteenths
Sweep	noise on oscillator 2 under a band pass, LFO on the cutoff
Sync Lead	oscillator sync, swept by the modulation envelope
Ring Bell	ring modulation, and the pulse width under the mod envelope
Wobble	a square LFO locked to the beat, which is the whole patch
Noise Perc	a high pass on noise with no sustain at all
Phaser Pad	the effect unit, on one of its four phasers
Ladder Lead	the ladder filter driven into its saturation

Building the archetypes

Pad / Strings — sustained, wide. Slow attack, high sustain, long release. Width comes from detuning against yourself: unison voices spread a few cents apart, or two oscillators slightly out of tune. Beating between near-identical pitches is what the ear hears as "lush".

The trap: width stages multiply. Four unison voices of two detuned saws, opened wide by a filter envelope and run through both chorus and delay, is twenty-four saws at full brightness — and that is heard as noise, not as an ensemble. Pick one or two smearing stages, not five.

Bass — short, dark, mono-ish. A fast filter envelope with a low sustain gives the initial thump; the sub oscillator supplies weight the fundamental alone cannot. Keep it dry: reverb and delay on a bass patch blur the attack that makes it read as a bass at all.

Pluck — decay only. Use no sustain and short amplitude and filter decays. Keyboard tracking can preserve or increase brightness on high notes; envelope times remain unchanged across the keyboard.

Lead — cutting, monophonic. Portamento between notes, one strong oscillator, resonance high enough to give a formant peak. Delay for space, but keep the dry signal dominant or it stops sounding like one instrument.

Bell / metallic — inharmonic. This is the one archetype subtractive synthesis cannot reach by filtering, because filtering only removes harmonics that are already harmonic. Two routes:

• FM — a modulator at a non-integer ratio produces sidebands at carrier ± n·modulator, which are inharmonic unless the ratio is a whole number. Put the modulation envelope on the FM amount and the brightness decays like a struck object.
• Ring modulation — sum and difference frequencies, always inharmonic unless the two are related.

Bells also want a fast attack and a long, smooth decay with no sustain.

Organ — steady state. No envelope worth the name: instant attack, full sustain, short release. Character comes entirely from the mix of octaves, which is what a drawbar is. Everything must be exactly in tune — an organ is the least forgiving archetype for a stray detune, because with no envelope movement there is nothing to hide beating behind.

Percussion — noise plus a filter. Noise on oscillator 2, no sustain, a very short amplitude decay. The filter chooses the character: high pass for hats, band pass for snares, low pass for toms. Pitch is almost irrelevant.

Sweep / texture — the modulation is the patch. A band pass on noise with an LFO on the cutoff. Worth knowing before you build one: a band pass costs about 25 dB against the same patch through a low pass, because noise spread across the spectrum loses most of its energy to a narrow window. That is what a band pass is for, but it means the level has to be made back somewhere — after the filter, not before it.

Distorted / driven — gain staging matters. The amplifier is downstream of the filter. If a resonant filter produces unwanted distortion, reducing amplifier gain lowers the result but does not remove the upstream nonlinearity. Correct the level or drive at the stage where distortion is generated.

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