Guide 9 of 9 · Every Try it box opens the synth with its steps pinned on the rack

Effects & mixing: space, width and punch

A dry synth patch can sound small, like it's playing in a cupboard. Effects give it a place to live: a room, an echo, a width that spreads between your speakers. Mixing makes several sounds fit together instead of fighting. This last guide covers both, and ends with how to record what you've made.

Where effects go: after the VCA

Here's the first rule, and the reason for it. In a typical patch, the VCA is what makes each note stop. Put a delay or reverb before the VCA and the VCA chops off the echoes along with the note. Put it after the VCA and the echoes keep ringing after the note has ended, which is the whole point of an echo.

So effects usually go at the end of the chain: oscillator → filter → VCA → effects → output.

Delay: echoes

A Delay records the sound and plays it back a moment later.

Time: how long until the echo.
Fdbk (feedback): how much of each echo is fed back in to echo again. Low is a single repeat; high is a long trail.
Tone: darkens each repeat, so echoes fade like they would in a real space.
Mix: how much echo you hear against the original (dry versus wet).

Reverb: a room

A Reverb simulates thousands of reflections off walls, all blurring together into a tail. Size sets how big the room is; Mix sets how far away the sound seems. More reverb pushes a sound into the distance.

Try itGive a pluck some space

A sequenced pluck, a Delay and a Reverb, all unpatched. Build the pluck dry, then give it space:

Patch the Clock's 1/8 into the Sequencer's CLK, the Sequencer's V/OCT into the VCO's V/OCT, and its GATE into the ADSR's GATE.
Patch the VCO's OUT into the VCA's IN, the ADSR's OUT into the VCA's CV, and the VCA's OUT into the Output's MONO. A short, dry pluck.
Move the VCA's cable from the Output to the Delay's IN, and patch the Delay's OUT into the Output's MONO. Echoes.
Now the room: move the Delay's cable from the Output to the Reverb's IN, and patch the Reverb's OUT into the Output's MONO.

Then play with it:

Turn each effect's Mix down to zero, then bring it back. Listen to how much bigger the space makes the sound.
Order matters: delay then reverb puts the echoes inside the room. Swap them: VCA → Reverb → Delay → Output, and hear the difference.
Add an LFO with a small Depth and a slow Rate, and patch it into the Delay's TIME: a wobbly, tape-like warble.

⏻ Build lesson 10 in KablesThe modules are waiting, unpatched. These steps come with you.

Chorus, phaser and flanger

These three effects all do the same basic thing: mix a sound with a moving copy of itself. What differs is how the copy moves.

Chorus: copies that are slightly delayed and detuned, like several players playing the same part. Thick and lush.
Phaser: sweeping notches in the sound. A liquid "whoosh".
Flanger: a tiny delay with feedback. A jet plane.

The Mod FX module has all three, in stereo: its left and right copies sweep in opposite directions, which makes the sound spread wide between your speakers.

Stereo and sidechain

Two mixing tricks that make sounds fit together.

Panning places a sound somewhere between the left and right speakers. The Stereo Pan module can do it by hand or sweep it automatically.

Ducking turns one sound down whenever another one plays. In dance music, pads and bass duck every time the kick hits, which makes room for the kick and creates that rhythmic "pumping". The Ducker listens to its SIDE input: every hit there pushes the sound down by Depth, and it swells back up over Release. Because the control comes from a different sound, this is called sidechaining.

A mixing desk: levels, pans and sends

When several sounds share a patch, a Stereo Mixer is a small mixing desk. Every channel has a Level, a Pan and a Send. The send copies some of that channel to the SEND output. Patch that into a reverb and bring the reverb back into RETURN, and all your sounds can share one reverb, each with a different amount of it. That's how studios do it, and it makes a mix sound like everything is in the same room.

Compression: punch and glue

A Compressor turns the loud moments down so the sound is more even, then Makeup turns everything back up. The quiet details come forward, and a beat sounds denser and more solid.

Thresh: anything louder than this gets turned down.
Ratio: by how much. 6:1 means a sound 6 dB over the threshold comes out only 1 dB over.
Attack: how fast it clamps down. A slower attack lets the first snap of each drum through before it grips, and that's what makes drums punch.
Release: how fast it lets go.

Recording what you made

When a patch sounds good, catch it. The Recorder captures whatever you patch into it as a stereo WAV file you can drop into any audio editor or music software. Outputs can feed several inputs at once, so it can listen to the same signal as the Output.

What to remember

Effects usually go after the VCA, so their tails keep ringing when notes stop.
Delay repeats; reverb places a sound in a room. The order they come in changes the sound.
Chorus, phaser and flanger mix a sound with a moving copy of itself.
Ducking (sidechain) turns one sound down when another plays, making room and adding pump.
Sends let several sounds share one effect.
Compression evens out loud and quiet; a slower attack keeps the punch.

That's the end of the guides. From here, the best teacher is the rack itself: load a factory patch, press Explain, and start changing things.