Synth

The synth is subtractive and monophonic: oscillators into a mixer, into a filter, into effects. Nothing about that layout is unusual. What makes it follow a performance instead of a keyboard is what drives each stage — the pitch, loudness and attacks arriving from the tracker 125 times a second, moving smoothly between readings.

Oscillators and mixer

Two oscillator sections mix down to one signal. The first blends sine, triangle, square, saw and noise; the second adds its own saw/square blend with DETUNE. Both sections transpose independently: OCTAVE in whole octaves, SEMI in semitones up to an octave either way. Your tracked pitch drives both together, so a saw-heavy blend and a sine-heavy blend play the same performance in a different color. A few cents of detune on osc 2 thickens the tone into a beating unison. On the noise oscillator, COLOR runs from white at 0 to pink at 1 — hissy to breathy.

Filter

A highpass and a lowpass, with a toggle between a 12 dB slope and a 24 dB ladder. The ladder is the rounder and darker of the two, and it adds a DRIVE knob that saturates inside the filter for grit and a tamer resonance.

Two controls tie the filter to your playing rather than leaving it parked. ENV > CUTOFF opens the cutoff with your dynamics, so pushing a note brightens it. KEY FOLLOW raises the cutoff as you play higher, keeping the timbre even up the range instead of letting the top end go dull.

Envelope

There is no attack, decay, sustain or release to dial in. Loudness follows your own playing directly: quick enough to speak on a short, quiet note, smoothed enough not to zipper. That is deliberate. Your dynamics are already an envelope, and a second one set on the panel would spend the whole performance fighting the first.

Tracking

Four controls in the TRACKING section change how the synth responds to the tracker rather than how it sounds. These are the ones to reach for when the notes are wrong, not the tone.

GLIDE smooths the tracked pitch, from 1 ms up to 200 ms. Short keeps every inflection; long rounds off jumps into portamento and forgives a scooped entry.

ACCENT sets how much harder a tongued or plucked note hits than a slurred one. At zero every note starts the same way.

NOISE GATE is a level below which input never reaches the tracker at all. Raise it if room noise or breath sets off notes you did not play; lower it if quiet playing gets cut off.

SENSITIVITY is how readily a sound counts as a pitched note. Lower it if note tails — vocal fry, the end of a breath — make the pitch jump an octave or leave ghost notes hanging. Raise it if soft playing gets missed.

Effects and output

Chorus and delay sit after the filter. Chorus at 0 is bypassed; above that it thickens and widens the tone. Delay at 0 is bypassed; FEEDBACK sets how many times the echoes repeat and is capped short of runaway.

At the output, DRIVE is saturation that adds harmonic grit without raising the level, and WIDTH spreads the stereo image from mono at 0.

DRY/WET blends your own instrument against the synth. It is the one control deliberately kept out of presets: load a new sound mid-set and your blend stays exactly where you left it, because it is a performance control rather than part of the patch. Everything else on the panel is recalled by the preset dropdown.

Next: running Contour in a DAW.