Kontour

WHY KONTOUR?

"I needed a polyphonic synth with an organic and sometimes aggressive sound. It had to be very responsive to playing dynamics. The nice thing was that Reaktor had all the raw material I needed.

Spark was the result of the first phase of this research. It was based on two oscillators with basic waveforms and some rather unusual feedback routing options. Then came CHA-OSC (available in the Reaktor User Library), a variation of Spark incorporating some new ideas.

My next attempt was called Phase 22 and it evolved over the course of a couple of years to become the basis of Kontour. Phase 22 was more of a private project. In the meantime I created the modal synth Prism and the sample-reading instrument Skanner with Native Instruments."

"Digital technologies can create sounds which are so much more interesting than those from analog emulations. A good example is FM. The technology is still underestimated. FM8 has demonstrated its power, but I was looking for a much simpler engine.

The result is the two-operator core of Kontour. From only two sine oscillators, you get lots of sound colors and really responsive dynamics. The second definitive component is the Comb Filter. It is a delay structure that can work as a resonator and often behaves similarly to a real physical acoustic system.

Two additional key components of Kontour are distortion (wave-shaping) and feedback routing. In combination with the FM signal source, the comb resonator and a multi-mode filter, they give the instrument a very complex and organic character. Or it can drift into chaos."

"If you compare Kontour with the original instrument Phase 22 (pictured below), you see that it was a challenge to give it an appealing and accessible user interface. This was realized in close collaboration with the experienced and talented people at Native Instruments.

When the Comb Filter is used as a tuned resonator, it needs to produce a very stable pitch independent from the settings of the filters in its feedback loop – this was another big challenge.

Kontour was developed by making hundreds of small improvements over the course of several years. This meant I often had to program new sounds, because the originals were broken by changes to the instrument."