70% off “VS – Visual Synthesizer” by Imaginando

Designed To Help You Express Your Musical Creativity Graphically

“VS – Visual Synthesizer” provides an easy and intuitive way to create reactive visuals from your musical projects and compositions. It consists of a collection of customisable materials which can be blended together to create personalised visual compositions.

Overview

“VS – Visual Synthesizer” is an additive synthesizer in which oscillators do not produce sound, but visuals. These oscillators are called materials. Just like an audio oscillator will produce a distinct sound, a material produces a unique visual output. A material can have one or more parameters that can alter its characteristics. Materials are loaded into layers.

A layer is a polyphonic synthesis engine which means that the same material can be played by multiple voices. Different voices have different characteristics and this could affect particularities of a material assigned to a layer, resulting in increased expressiveness.

Layers play an important role in VS, as you can stack them in order to create your visual composition. In VS there are 8 layers. Additionally there is a background layer with special characteristics.

User Interface

VS’ interface consists of the following elements:

• 1) Help – This launches a set of quickstart tool tips to guide you through your first steps of navigating the VS interface
• 2) Frame Rate Counter – This is useful for you to see if you are achieving your target frame rate.
• 3) Undo/Redo – allows you to undo / redo changes
• 4) Layer manager – view, select, edit and reorder your layers here
• 5) Expand window – resizes the render area to fit the entire window and hides all overlays and controls.
• 6) Launch external display – This mode is suitable for live performance and VJ use, to generate a clean feed of the render output for projection or video capture, while being able to use VS controls on another screen.
• 7) Record button – records VS’ render output to disk as a video file.
• 8) Layer Controls – access the current layer’s parameter controls
• 9) Layer Modulations – edit LFOs, envelope generators and audio modulators here
• 10) Show/hide Layer Modulations – increases size of render area by collapsing the modulation section

The status bar across the top of VS’ window includes the following labelled elements:

• MIDI Learn – Assign VS parameter control to a MIDI controller.
• Clock source – select timing/tempo source
• Tempo – shows VS current tempo BPM
• Patch – show/hide VS patch manager

The status bar also contains four icon buttons (from left to right):

• Disk icon – save current patch state
• Revert icon – revert current patch to its last saved/original state
• Up arrow – select the current bank’s previous patch
• Down arrow – select the current bank’s next patch

“VS – Visual Synthesizer” is much more than just a traditional music visualisation tool. It is designed to help you express your musical creativity graphically, by giving you the power of control and customisation using both audio and MIDI. It takes a synthesizer approach to the world of audio visualisation, making creation of visuals much more accessible to musicians than it has been till now.

For more information on these functions see the User Manual HERE.

Fine Tuning Your Audio/Visual Creation

Layer Controls

The layer control panel provides access to the parameters of the currently selected layer. The number of controls that appear for each layer varies depending on the layer’s active material, specifically the amount of custom parameters the material contains. When a layer is selected, the available controls automatically change.

Background Layer

The background layer has its own set of parameters, since it deals with image and video. The background layer honours the color panel selection if no image or video is set.

Layer Modulations

This panel is divided into three sections: LFOs, envelopes and audio modulation. These are audio related terms that were chosen so people using this software with their audio compositions can feel at home in the visual world also.

Modulation Sources

• LFO – LFOs are signals with very low frequencies, whose output can be used to modulate audio signals
• EG (Envelope Generator) – In audio terms, the envelope generator shapes the sound amplitude over time using the following parameters; Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release, also known as ‘ADSR’. There are you two independent EGs to choose from.

Audio Modulators

Finally, on the right of the modulators panel there is the audio modulator panel. Here it’s possible to use the input audio as a modulation source, just like the LFOs and EGs. There are four independent audio modulators, with two modes of operation:

• GATE – in this mode audio input will serve as a modulator only if its amplitude is above a specific level, defined by the THRESHOLD parameter.
• SPCTRM (Spectrum) – This mode is very similar to the gate mode, but with the advantage of the audio being “divided” into frequency bands.

AUDIO MODULATOR PARAMETERS:

• Numbered boxes – select the mode of the current audio modulator (Gate or Spectrum)
• Threshold – Define the limit where the input will start to be used as modulation
• Gain –  can be useful to amplify quieter signals or to reduce strong ones
• Attack – the attack is related to the amount of time a given signal takes to reach the maximum value.
• Release – this defines the time the output modulation will take to reach the zero value.

Modulation Matrix

The modulation matrix panel lets you assign modulation sources to specific layer parameters, arranged in a two dimensional grid of cells, with modulation sources on the x axis (top) and parameters on the y axis (left).

The matrix is split into three tabs, with a thin yellow bar highlighting the currently displayed tab, click each yellow tab line to access the different pages of each layer’s parameters.

In addition to the LFO, EG and AM (audio modulator) modulation sources, a further two sources are available for MIDI note data trigger based modulation:

• KBD (Keyboard) – the amount of modulation determined by the pitch of the note on events.
• VEL (Velocity) – the amount of modulation determined by the velocity of the MIDI note on events

You can also choose to reset the layer to a blank background.

For more information on these functions see the User Manual HERE.