Overtonium / Presets
Presets
Thirty-four presets ship with the plugin. All but a handful were dialled in on the panel and converted straight from the saved file, so what ships is what was played rather than something written afterwards to approximate it.
Hear them played
Eleven of them played rather than rendered. The clips further down are one chord each, the same chord every time, which is what makes them comparable and also what stops them showing what a preset does once somebody is playing it. The video is the other half of that.
Played on an Expressive E Osmose, with nothing on the output but the plugin's own effects.
Straight to one of them:
What ships
Thirty-four presets, and none of them are variations on one another. Just Saw and Equal Saw are the pair worth playing against each other first: identical patches except for TUNE, and they sound nothing alike.
Each one plays the same thing, a spread C major arriving a note at a time and let go together, so they can be listened down rather than each showing itself off in its own way. The clips are rendered by the plugin rather than recorded, so they cannot drift from what it does, and the levels are where the presets put them rather than matched to each other. Nothing downloads until you press play.
Twenty-six of them ask for one of the six oscillator characters, which is part of the patch like everything else here, so what you hear is the preset as it ships. Two of the six are worth knowing about while listening: Bulb only shows itself when the pitch moves, and Op-amp only touches partials above a kilohertz, so both of them do more on a keyboard than they do in a clip of a held chord.
- 2-bit Fuzz Organ
- An organ at 8 kHz and 2 bits, where the aliasing and the quantisation noise are the distortion. The modulation wheel or aftertouch blends the root note towards a fifth
- 60s Organ
- A combo organ that has not been serviced, with a few milliseconds of key click on every note. It runs into a bucket brigade driven hard enough that the repeats grow rather than fade, and falls into a spring long enough to still be ringing when the next chord arrives
- 6581 Triangle
- The triangle of a MOS 6581, the SID in a Commodore 64. A triangle is odd harmonics falling as the square of their number, and this is not quite that: the chip folds the top bit of its accumulator and drops the lowest one, so what it draws is a staircase rather than a line. The even harmonics that leaves, and the floor underneath them, are most of why a SID sounds like a SID
- Big Saw
- A sawtooth with a little randomness in it, so it drifts and beats rather than sitting still
- Cathedral
- Principal chorus: octaves and fifths only, the registration an organ builder would recognise, arriving slowly as the pipes speak
- DigiLog
- A digital instrument through tired analogue gear. The envelope delay climbs with the partial, so the series arrives from the bottom up and steps open like a filter rather than sweeping, at 16 kHz and 8 bits
- Dire Dire EP
- A soft, round electric piano of the kind written for underwater music. Dark except for the 13th and 15th partials, left standing clear of their neighbours as the tine
- Drawbar Organ
- Nine drawbars, with the key-off stage used as a release click. The upper drawbars jump to 55% for two milliseconds as the contacts break
- Dream Phase
- A strike that becomes a pad without either half being a layer. The short partials are the transient and the long ones arrive behind them as it opens, with two stepping on squares behind it and an echo that is nearly all feedback
- EP Chimes
- A round electric piano with bright chimes above it, at 16 kHz and 8 bits so the artefacts belong to the sound rather than sitting on top of it
- Equal Saw
- Just Saw with every partial pulled back to equal temperament
- FM Piano
- The electric piano an FM synthesizer makes rather than the one it is imitating, in the manner of a DX7
- Glass Armonica
- Wet fingers on glass. Each partial arrives later and vibrates faster than the one below it
- Glide
- A pad that arrives from the bottom up. The fundamental lands at once and every partial above it glides in a little later, round and slow played softly, bright and punchy played hard
- Glockenspiel
- A struck bar. Nothing sustains, so every partial rings down from the moment it is hit, each for its own length, and the tone is carried by the fourth and eleventh partials rather than by the fundamental
- Init
- The neutral starting point: the first three partials and nothing else. It clears the patch and leaves the session alone
- Just Saw
- The same sound as Equal Saw with every partial at its exact whole-number ratio
- Lo-fi
- 8 kHz and 8 bits, soft, with very short partials arriving at different times. The territory of a Roland D-50, a Korg Wavestation or a granular synthesizer
- Metallic Piano
- A thin, metallic upright piano
- Music Box
- Plucked steel teeth: irregular vibrato per partial, with one bent far further than the rest
- Nylon EP
- A very round electric piano, as though the tines were nylon rather than steel
- Odd Harmonics
- Every even partial silent, which is the hollow tone of a stopped pipe. Velocity opens the top of the series
- Omni-84
- The SonicStrings Voice 2 from a Suzuki Omnichord OM-84 System Two
- Shimmer
- Every partial breathes at its own rate, so the spectrum never repeats
- Slow Pad
- Staggered envelope delays, so the spectrum unfolds rather than arriving at once, with mirrored pans across the series
- Space Flute
- A synthesised pan flute a long way off, with the breath on the noise channel and the distance in the echo and the reverb
- Sparkle Pad
- Two instruments split by where a partial sits in the series. The bottom three sustain and take up to three quarters of a second to arrive, and everything above them attacks at once and is gone inside half a second
- Stepped
- A slow pad that will not hold still. Seven partials trill on squares set to whole intervals, two at a fifth and five at an octave, while the top three take their level from sample and hold
- Struck Bell
- Higher partials die away first, which is what makes a struck body sound struck. Strike it harder and the upper partials arrive
- StyloPoly
- Voice 3 of a Dubreq Stylophone S-1 with the vibrato on, polyphonic as the Stylophone is not, and with the vibrato shared across the keyboard the way one oscillator with one vibrato on it has to be. Every partial's level wanders on a smooth random contour of its own
- Synth Ensemble
- Strings and brass in one patch. Nothing in it arrives at the same moment, and the blow decides by how much: a hard chord is simply there, a quiet one swells in over a couple of seconds with the series drifting apart on the way
- Tape Choir
- Vowel-ish: a formant hump in the low partials rather than a straight roll-off, on an old machine with dark, unsteady repeats
- Vibraphone
- A fast strike where the fundamental rings for seconds and everything above it is gone inside one
- Wurli
- A Wurlitzer 200A electric piano, with one tremolo circuit across the whole keyboard rather than one per tine, so a chord breathes as one thing
What a preset carries
The patch and nothing else. Everything in the Settings menu stays where you put it, which is the rule rather than a list that might fall behind one: the menu is where the instrument is set up and the panel is where the sound is made. So loading a preset never changes your polyphony, your temperament, your reference pitch, your pitch bend range, your MPE or aftertouch routing, or what leaves the outputs. Nor your master fader, your window size or your LINK settings. Those are properties of the session you are working in rather than of any one sound in it, and having a patch drag you back to equal temperament in the middle of a piece would be no help.
Presets you save follow the same rule as the ones that ship, and carry exactly the same set of controls. A preset saved before this was true still loads, and the settings it recorded are ignored rather than applied.
That includes Init. It is still a preset, so it clears the patch and leaves the session where you set it.
Values are stored plain rather than normalised, so a preset survives a parameter's range being widened later, and anything a file does not mention keeps its default rather than being reset.
Switching them over MIDI
A MIDI program change loads a factory preset, so a keyboard, a foot controller or a clip in your host can change the sound without anyone touching the menu. The number picks the entry by its position in the Factory list, counting from zero, and the list is alphabetical. Hosts and hardware that number program changes from one are one ahead of that, so their 1 is the first entry. A number past the last preset is ignored rather than wrapping round to the start.
The preset is loaded whether or not it is the one already showing, which is what a program change does on an instrument with a panel. A clip that begins with one therefore sounds the same on every pass, and anything you had changed by hand is replaced. If you want to keep those edits, save them as a preset of your own first.
Only the factory presets have a number to be called by. Presets of your own live in a folder you can add to and rename at any time, so nothing in them would stay put long enough to be worth pointing a clip at. The same goes across versions: a release that adds a factory preset moves every preset alphabetically after it, so a clip written against an older version can name a different sound in a newer one. Sessions are safe from that, since a saved session records the preset's name as well as its number and the name decides.
It arrives on any channel, MPE included, and it carries the same things loading a preset by hand does. Your polyphony, temperament and the rest of the Settings menu stay where you put them.
Saving your own
Saving writes one small file per preset, and the menu reads that folder every time it opens, so a preset added from outside the plugin shows up without a restart. The folder is created on demand.
What is loaded is named on the bar, on a display of nine cells. A name longer than that is fitted rather than simply cut: the spaces go first, then the vowels from the right, and only then is what is left trimmed. So Tape Choir keeps every letter as TAPECHOIR and Glass Armonica comes out as GLASSRMNC. The menu, the file on disk and what your host is told all carry the name in full. Nothing about the name is changed by saving it.
| Platform | Where they live |
|---|---|
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/Dehli Musikk/Overtonium/Presets |
| Windows | %APPDATA%\Dehli Musikk\Overtonium\Presets |
| Linux | ~/.config/Dehli Musikk/Overtonium/Presets |
They are small XML files holding parameter values, so they can be read, edited, kept under version control and passed to someone else by copying the file. The menu sorts by name rather than by whatever order the filesystem hands them back.
Folders become groups. Make a folder in the preset folder and it appears in the menu as a submenu holding whatever is inside it, nested as deeply as you nest the folders. There is nothing to set up and no second place to manage it: the folders are the groups, so moving a preset between them is moving a file. Groups are listed before the presets sitting loose beside them, and the preset currently loaded is ticked wherever it lives.