Tips & Tricks
The next few pages are chock full of more or less useful programming techniques, several of which
were kindly supplied by early adopters of Bazille. Somemay seem too obvious, while others are so
twisted that they will take a good while to grasp!
Most of the tricks have corresponding example presets you will find in the TIPS & TRICKS folder.
But first, some advice...
General Tips
Less CPU
Although classic modular synths are single-voice, Bazille offers up to 16 at the same time. Go
easy on your CPU, use
legato
or
mono
mode (TWEAKS & FX / VOICE /
Mode
) unless you
really need polyphony, or set
Voices
to only 4 if that’s enough. Keeping the maximum polyphony
low also means you can set longer envelope release times without overtaxing your system.
Try switching
Multicore
on. If the CPU usage doesn’t drop at least a bit, switch it off again.
Experiment
It’s all too easy to limit your options by basing your patches on typical ‘fixed architecture’ synth
signal flow.
Three LFO-wobbled oscillators sent through a pair of filter in parallel, with envelopes
modulating both cutoff frequencies
isn’t really pushing Bazille into new territory.
Bazille is a true modular synthesizer, it begs you to
connect an almost-self-resonating bandpass
filter into an oscillator’s phase modulation input, use that oscillator to modulate the resonance
while a sampled & held triangle from a pressure-driven mapping generator modulates the rate
of an LFO multiplied with the oscillator’s output
. Or similar!
Keeping it clean
Before calling your patch ‘ultimate final’, and while you still understand the spaghetti you have
just cooked, it’s a good idea to remove unused cables and even set unused parameters back to
their defaults (if you’re so inclined). Neat and tidy patches are much easier to understand and
improve when you revisit the patch.
Like in hardware modular systems, there’s no cure-all for cable spaghetti. If you have a choice,
connect neighbouring modules together in preference to more distant ones.
Re-use modulators
Sending one modulation source to multiple destinations can make patches more rhythmically
coherent and manageable. For instance, you could use an LFO’s square for one modulation
(e.g. pitch), its triangle for another (e.g. cutoff), highpass-filtered lagged square for a third (e.g.
Fractalize) and rectified triangle for a fourth (e.g. oscillator volume).
Performance controls (wheels, pressure, velocity) modulating several parameters at the same
time can make your patch react to your playing more like a real (acoustic) instrument.
Future reference
Whenever a certain behaviour isn’t 100% clear, read the appropriate section of this user guide
again, and if necessary devise minimalistic experiments to test how things work.
Remember: You can jump between chapters by clicking on the links at the bottom of each page,
or jump to the start of each chapter using the links at the top of each page.
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