Beat Kitchen Harmonic Synth

The Harmonic Vocoder - The resonator has been rebuilt as a vocoder. Your sound passes THROUGH a bank of tuned peaking bells rather than being replaced by filtered noise. Wide Air leaves the source dry; tighten it and the bands resonate into it, reaching a comb at the narrowest settings. - Key Track is the mode switch. On, the bands follow the keyboard and it plays as an instrument — chords, transposition, the Harmonic Gate, all of it. Off, it is a fixed filter you can sweep. - Point it at a loaded sample and the bands track that sample's spectrum as it evolves, so the resonance follows the sound instead of freezing a single moment of it. - It sits on the same Blend control as the oscillators, level-matched, so you can crossfade between additive synthesis and vocoding without the loudness moving. - Every synth control now reaches it: Transpose, Detune, Re-Excite, the Overtone Scan, Extended Fold and the Harmonic Gate all shape the vocoder exactly as they shape the oscillators. Input Monitor - A headphone button on the Live control passes the incoming side-chain straight to the output, so you can hear and see your input on the scope with no notes held. Green when signal is arriving, amber when a bus is connected but silent, red when nothing is connected. Set up a side-chain without guessing. The scope - Scope Glow: a hard line through to a diffuse gas-tube bloom. - Scope Colour: sets the hue, and the line, dot, trail, oscilloscope and spectrum all follow it. - All five scope controls are modulation targets, each with its own mod cog. Route Velocity to Scope Colour and the trace shifts colour with how hard you play. Modulation - Mod targets throughout the synth. Almost every control now carries a cog, so the synth's own engine can drive nearly anything in the interface — including the scope itself. - Out Level is a new modulation source: the synth's own output, fast to rise and slow to fall, so loud notes read as a pulse you can route anywhere. - Extreme ranges, from sub-atomic frequencies to earth weather patterns: LFO rates run from audio rate down to cycles that span years. BKS Harmonic now incorporates data from the popular Beat Kitchen Weather Sonification Project. Learn more on our website. Also new - Click the keys in the Harmonic Gate to choose which notes it gates against. No MIDI keyboard needed, and the selection saves with the preset. - Resynth Speed: lock a sample's playback speed to pitch, tape-style, or keep the two independent. Performance - The interface no longer freezes while monitoring live input. Worst frame: 3.6 seconds to 19ms. - Playing a note no longer overruns the host's deadline — the cause of dropouts and sync errors. - A third of the audio thread was spent comparing parameter names. That work is gone. - The scope draws as one figure — line, glow and trail from a single geometry, in curves rather than thousands of segments — so it stays smooth and locked together as pitch moves. Fixed - Blend no longer silences the synth when Sculpt is off (critical in 1.6.7). - Loading a sample no longer guts the resonator. - Folding no longer jumps an octave; lower octaves fade in. - The resonators are cleaner: steeper bands, less noise between harmonics, less bubbling. - The Harmonic Gate is consistent from note to note, and attenuates bands instead of deleting them. - A chord no longer makes the oscillators louder than the resonators. - Notes no longer click, or start loud and drop. - A deep transpose no longer makes the resonators disappear. - The oscillator meter no longer reads as maxed out when nothing is limiting.