For Musicians Building Your Own Patches |

Eventually, you'll want to use a sound that doesn't exist among Beatnik's built-in instruments. When this happens, it's time to create your own Instrument.
This can be a pretty involved process, so you may find it takes a little practice to get the best results. You'll need to decide if your sound requires new custom Samples, or if you can just re-use the built-in Samples and modify them with your Instrument parameters. In many cases you may be able to get the sound you're after by copying one of the existing built-in Instrument and changing some of its parameters.
To build your patches in the Beatnik Editor, you'll use the Instrument Editor window, and perhaps the Sample Editor window. For introductions to these editors, see the Production Technique Tips and Editing Instruments sections below.
Overview for Sound Designers
If you've spent time working with a multi-timbral MIDI sampler or wavetable synthesizer, you'll find Beatnik's software-based sampling and synthesis environment very familiar. Alternately, it may be helpful to think of Samples as the equivalent of a multitrack tape player and the rest of the Instrument definitions as your signal processing and mixing tools.
Each Instrument starts with one or more Samples. Whenever your Instrument receives a MIDI note one Sample is played - and its pitch is optionally transposed - depending on a Keymap that you design. The Sample is then processed by three further blocks (two of which are optional):
The Filter block (optional) The Gain Envelope block (optional) The Output block This block contains controls for the Instrument's default pan position and volume.
The Filter, Gain Envelope, and Output blocks can also be affected by Modulators, which we'll talk about shortly.
Beyond the individual voice, each MIDI channel also supports several MIDI Continuous Controllers that affect the audio of all notes being played on that channel - including volume, stereo pan, and other parameters that have parallel controls in the Instrument design. For details, see Continuous Controllers.
Finally, all Instrument are mixed together in the Beatnik mixer (not shown above), which provides optional reverb and chorus effects with an independent send control for each of the 16 MIDI channels - see Effects: Reverb and Chorus.

For Musicians / Building Your Own Patches top |