Instruction Manual

Tuning

The Tuning slider lets you adjust the pitch of the entire plant by up to one octave up

or down. When planting a new seed, Synplant tries to figure out the pitch of the

sound so that the center of the slider represents a correctly tuned pitch. However,

occasionally, it might make a mistake and you will need to manually tune the sound

using this slider.

Atonality

The Atonality slider is somewhat intricate. Think of it as a slider that determines what

type of sounds the plant will produce: playable sounds or sound effects. With lower

settings, longer branches will become more musical and "playable". Higher settings

create atonal sounds and weird sound effects. Furthermore, higher settings can

make melodic sounds lose their perfectly tuned scales, mimicking the effect of poorly

tuned acoustic instruments.

Please note that the Atonality value has a very subtle effect on short branches and a

very drastic effect on fully grown ones. If you leave it at a low setting, you can be al-

most certain that your plant will keep its tuning when it grows. This is especially use-

ful if you use the mod wheel to modulate a pitched sound.

Effect

The Effect slider adjusts the effect mix and panning amount. It lets you go from a

completely dry monophonic sound to a wet voluminous sound. (The exact depth and

character of the effect depends on the sound-seed genome, which is described later.) Ste-

reo panning is normally related to branch position in the bulb, so that left-side

branches pan to the left and vice-versa. By reducing the effect amount, this panning

effect is also reduced.

Note that although Synplant is "polyphonic", there is only a single global reverb. It can hap-

pen that the branches of your plant attain different settings for the reverb when they grow

out. In this case, the last pressed MIDI key determines which reverb settings are active. For

example, one branch might have a long reverb tail while another one has a short. If you play

the branch with the long tail and immediately after that the one with the short tail, it will cut

off the reverb.

Release

The Release slider controls the release time of the sound, i.e. the time it takes for the

sound to fade out completely after the key has been released. Certain seeds do not

have a sustained quality by nature (they are "one shot"). In this case you may not no-

tice much difference if you increase the release time. With long reverberant sounds,

the lowest Release settings will "gate" the built-in reverb so that it will be quickly

muted when you release the keys.