Sound and presets

What each channel sounds like, how to change it while the rig plays, and how to make a channel behave as something its engine is not.

What it is

CONTROL is the sound page, and it follows the engine. A drum engine gives you KIT, SAMPLE and RANGE; a synth engine gives you PRESET, CUTOFF, RESO, ENV and DECAY. Encoders 6, 7 and 8 are LEVEL, REVERB and DELAY on every channel — the same three controls in the same place, always.

A greyed PRESET means this chain has nothing to step through — not that presets are unavailable in general. Some chains are built by setting a synth’s controls directly rather than by choosing a preset, and those start with no bank picked; the knob stays live there, because the engine’s own presets are on disk waiting for you to turn it. It greys out only where the bank really is empty.

The engine decides, not the behaviour. A sampler played by the Turing register still has a kit and a sample, so it still shows them. Switching a channel's kind changes how it is played, never what it is.

Every channel keeps its engine for the life of the snapshot. Nothing is created or destroyed while you play, because building a plugin rebuilds the audio graph and that is a hole in the sound.

Try it

1. Select Group A (KICK) and press CONTROL. Encoder 1 is KIT, encoder 2 is SAMPLE.
2. Turn SAMPLE. The kick changes to another sound inside the same kit, immediately.
3. Press the button to the right of the big encoder. Same effect — it steps the selected channel's sound without using an encoder.
4. Hold SHIFT and press it again. Now it steps the kit rather than the sample. Only a drum engine has kits, so on a synth channel this does nothing.
5. Select Group G (LEAD) and press CONTROL. Now encoder 1 is PRESET and encoders 2–5 are CUTOFF, RESO, ENV and DECAY.
6. Turn CUTOFF. You are driving the synth that is actually loaded, not a fixed idea of one.
7. Now the interesting one. Select Group E (OHAT) and hold SHIFT while pressing GRID. The channel changes what it behaves as. Do it again to change back.

One channel arrives switched

E · OHAT ships as a voice. It keeps its Simmons kit and its sampler, but the Turing register drives it rather than euclid, so it walks between samples instead of laying down a straight hat.

If your open hat wanders and you did not ask it to, that is the factory state and not a fault. Press SHIFT + GRID on E to hear it as an ordinary euclidean hat. It ships that way so the switch is audible the moment you plug in.

How switching a kind works

SHIFT + GRID switches the selected channel between drum and voice behaviour. The engine is never swapped. A drum kit gets the Turing generator, and a synth gets euclid.

On a sampler the register walks the kit's own note list rather than ROOT and SCALE, because there a note selects a sample and scale-quantising would land most steps on empty keys — silence with nothing to explain it. On a synth, euclid becomes a root pulse: ROOT plus that channel's OCTAVE, on every hit.

Each channel keeps a separate set of parameters per kind, so switching back and forth does not cost you your settings. Pattern length and division deliberately do not move: they are pattern time, not kind, and the groove must not jump under a switch.

The surface says when a channel is not itself. The page indicator reads VOX or DRM, and GRID blinks for as long as the selected channel is on an overridden kind. Switching back clears the override rather than pinning the channel to a kind it merely happens to have today — so a later snapshot putting a different engine on that chain is not overruled by a stale choice nobody remembers making.

What it refuses, and why

A switch rewrites the pattern, so on a channel you have recorded onto it hands the pattern back to the generator and your take is gone. Hand-edited steps do not survive either, for the same reason turning HITS does not — switching rewrites the line from the generator.

A voice switched to drum may arrive silent, because its HITS can read back as 0. The tab draws dashed to say so. That is not a defect: turn HITS up.

A defect that was published here has been withdrawn. The buttons beside the big encoder were reported to step a preset once and then stick. They never did: they step every press. What stuck was the name. The value was drawn in a font that fits four characters, and preset banks are full of neighbours that agree on their first four — a padthv1 bank of 67 patches has six called Dusk, Dusk2 … Dusk6, and stepping walks a bank alphabetically. Six presses, one word on the screen, six variants of one pad. Names now draw in the small font at nine characters and keep their trailing digits, so every press shows its move.

Fifty-one starting points

The rig ships with fifty-one more snapshots beside the factory one — 031 to 080 and 101, all in bank 000. Six each of house, deep house, minimal, dub and trance from 120 to 140 BPM, then twenty space presets, then 101 as an eleventh dub.

All fifty-one were rebuilt on 4 September 2026, and it is worth knowing what changed, because the old ones were wrong in ways you would have blamed on yourself. Every preset had its eight faders at one identical setting, so nothing was mixed and whichever part was busiest won. Not one of them made a chord. Their drum grooves were fixed lists of steps with nothing behind them, so HITS and ROTATE showed numbers unrelated to what you heard and the first turn of either threw the groove away. Nineteen had a bass that played the flat seventh or the fifth on every sixteenth and never once the root. Now: a staged mix per family, sevenths in house and ninths in deep and a real triad in dub, euclidean grooves the panel agrees with, a bass of two to four notes a bar starting on the root, and swing on the hats.

061–080 are the space presets, and they are twenty rooms. Plate, chamber, hall, cathedral, tile, cavern, spring, gated, ambience, slapback, canyon, studio, basement, stairwell, glass, tunnel, chapel, hangar, closet, observatory. Three parts and eight modulators each, so there is nothing in the way of the room. They replaced twenty effect demos, eleven of which were note-for-note copies of another preset.

Each family carries its own pair of effects, and the drone presets carry one each — nineteen pairs across the seventy-one. House goes into a small room, deep house into a hall, minimal into the driest plate, dub through a proper dub delay, and the twenty drones each have a different reverb rather than twenty settings of one. The space series keeps the factory reverb, because its twenty rooms are twenty values of the one control only that reverb has.

Every preset is sent to its own room, and each family sends differently. The kick gets a hint of reverb and never an echo, the bass stays close to dry — two things fighting for the bottom octave is mud, and the kick loses — and the space sits on the lead and the pads, because a send is only audible on a part that lasts long enough to come back. Minimal is the driest of the six: in that family the space is the gap between the hits. House is a small tight room, deep house the same shape bigger and warmer, trance long and wide, dub the delay-forward one you meet in the factory preset, and the twenty space presets are the wettest of all because there the room is the point. Every send on every channel is written into the preset, including the ones set to nothing — an effect nobody sets does not come up silent, it comes up wherever its author left it, and on these fourteen effects that ranges from a tenth of the knob to nearly all of it.

They are fixed arrangements, not generative patches. Every voice arrives at LOCK — MELODY and RHYTHM both 0 — and nothing is modulated. Load one and it plays the same bar until you change something. That is deliberate: the rest of this instrument is about evolution, and these are the places to start from. Turn MELODY up and the preset becomes generative under your hands.

The five drum channels keep their roles. A is always the kick and E always the open hat; what changes is the machine — TR909 for house, TR808 and CR78 for dub, TR606 for minimal, SP-1200 for lo-fi. Kits are mixed across channels the way they are on a record, so a 909 kick can sit under an 808 clap.

031–060 use the delay and reverb you already know. 061–080 replace that pair with something else on every chain — tape and chorus, vinyl and room, phaser and hall — a different pair on each, none repeated. On those twenty, the REVERB and DELAY encoders still send to whatever now occupies those two slots, so the labels stay put while the sound does not.

101-dub-mutated is the odd one out. Every other preset in the pack gives its three voices different synths; this one runs all three on the same engine and separates them by register, octave and gate instead — a bass on the one and the offbeat doubled at the octave, a triad stab strictly offbeat, a fifth held above it. 120 BPM, B-flat pentatonic, TR909 throughout.

Load one from the touchscreen, inside bank 000. Nothing is created or destroyed while you play, so a snapshot change is the one moment the audio graph is rebuilt.

Twenty that never sit still

Snapshots 081–100 are the opposite instrument. The fifty above hold still until you move something; these have almost no rhythm and seven or nine slow modulators each, and they hold continuously rather than restarting.

These were the worst of the old presets and they are the most changed. All twenty used to be the same piece — identical registers, identical rhythms, twenty different reverbs over one arrangement. All eight channels attacked the first step together, and the chord that came out had no root in it, a minor second at the very bottom where the ear hears one rough beating tone rather than two notes, and two channels in exact unison doing no extra work. And they could not sustain: on a one-bar grid the longest note this instrument can hold is half a bar, so each “drone” played half a bar, stopped, and then all eight hit again — a chug, at two to four seconds a cycle.

What you get now is five layers, none of which ever start at the same instant. Two run four bars long, two run two, and their notes butt against each other so the sound is continuous while the harmony moves underneath. Sixteen entries across a four-bar cycle and no two together, which is meant to make the bar line impossible to hear. The key walks slowly — every eight bars on a drone, every four on an ambient one — and because a key change moves every voice by the same amount, nothing that was in tune stops being in tune.

081–090 are drones, 091–100 ambient — the ambient ones add a soft brushed percussion channel. Tempos run 60 to 80. Two of them, 088 and 093, are pentatonic and deliberately carry four layers instead of five: with five notes to the octave instead of seven a triad is half again as wide, and the fifth layer had nowhere to sit that was not already occupied.

These use SHIFT + GRID, saved. A channel plays as a voice only because the snapshot carries that override, so on a drone you will see GRID blinking and the page indicator reading VOX on channels A, B and C, which are normally drums. That is the instrument telling you the channel is not itself — it is the state, not a fault. Press SHIFT + GRID on one to hear it as a drum again.

Four of the ambient presets leave E on its sampler rather than giving it a synth, so the Turing register walks the kit's own samples. It is the trick the factory snapshot uses on the same channel, and it sounds nothing like a synth pad.

The modulation is bar-synced and deliberately slow — the slowest rate is a full sixteen bars, which at 60 BPM is a sweep over a minute long. Nothing here needs your hands to stay interesting. Turn any modulated knob and you steer the centre of its sweep rather than fighting it.

The synth engines this is proven on

Twenty-four LV2 synths, plus the sampler. Every one below has been run on this rig at eight instances at once, which is the hardest thing this instrument does. Nothing here is a recommendation from a plugin list; it is what has actually played.

Nine of them are not in a shipped snapshot any more, and that is a consequence of the 4 September rebuild rather than a verdict on them. The rebuilt presets choose an engine by its default polyphony — a chord collapses silently on a synth that comes up monophonic, or with two voices — and by whether it publishes a filter cutoff for the modulators to reach. That narrowed the set the packs use. The measurement stands either way, which is why they stay on this list: they load, they run eight-up, and any of them is a sound you can dial in yourself.

Two engines will collapse a chord and neither says so. Obxd’s voice count is a control like any other, and 018 shipped it at two voices on the LEAD chain; padthv1 has a mono switch, and the preset whose name makes it the obvious pad — Haze01 — has it on. Ask either for a triad and you get one note, at the right pitch, with nothing on the panel to explain the other two.

That is why the current factory snapshot forces the number rather than trusting the patch. 019-dub-factory writes Obxd’s voice count explicitly on both synth chains it uses — five on LEAD, eight on BASS with unison switched off, because unison stacks voices per note and would eat the polyphony a chord needs. If you are dialling in chords yourself, check the voice count first, and check it in the patch file rather than in the patch’s name.

One synth is out. SO-kl5 Piano Synthesizer was in a drone preset and cost 57.6 % of a core with 11 xruns at eight instances; it was replaced with RipplerX and that preset now runs at 38.6 % with none. It is the only engine on this rig that failed — a probe carrying six otherwise-unproven synths at once measured 16.4 %, so synths are not what runs this Pi out of headroom. Effects are; see Mixing and effects.

Any other LV2 synth Zynthian can load will work with the surface — the four page-1 knobs rebind by name and the generated pages are built from whatever it publishes. Untested means untested, not unsupported.

RANGE narrows the kit walk

When a drum channel is played by the Turing register, RANGE decides how much of the kit it may reach. It is encoder 3 of that channel's CONTROL page, because how wide the walk is belongs to the sound rather than to the pattern. It arrives at 1, which is one note: the channel keeps playing its own drum and the register decides only which steps sound. That is the useful thing most of the time — you get rhythm you could not have programmed, on the drum you chose.

Turn it up and the walk widens outward from that drum, taking in its neighbours in the kit, until at 4 it may use the whole thing. That is where a hats channel starts hitting kicks, which is occasionally what you want and usually not.

On a synth channel RANGE means octave spread instead, and it sits on that channel's STEP page. The column follows the engine, as the sound page always has — a kit walk only exists where there is a kit.

See also

• Deep parameter control — reaching everything else a plugin publishes
• Generating patterns — the two generators a channel can run
• Mixing and effects — LEVEL, REVERB and DELAY across the row