For those of you interested in unique VSTs, especially those with interesting visuals and MPE-ready playability and easy modulations, consider Kontrast by Dawesome Music. Kontrast is a wavetable synth with a very different take on how to modulate the wavetables and represent them on the screen. Kontrast Page
I bought it a couple days after it came out in its full version (was demo only for a bit I think). I have it preloaded in my default template in Live, along with his other VSTs, which I also own, including Myth, Kult, Abyss and Novum, all with MPE-defined modulated parameters set to go, so I can flip back and forth to play them on my Push 3 and Osmose. It is so easy in Peter’s (developer) VSTs to move back and forth between “MPE” for Push 3, which emphasizes x, y and z parameters and “Osmose 2” which emphasizes pressure (not sure what other differences there might be. I mostly though love to look at these beautiful VSTs on my large screen monitor and see his visual representation of what the various MPE modulations are doing to the sound, and the visuals, in real time. So satisfying!
Peter is a cool dude that’s for sure. Enjoy using his stuff as he’s hell bent on not recreating anything 1-1 but making his own way. More power to him.
That’s great. I was surprised to see that there are no tutorial videos for Kontrast linked on Dawesome’s website. The manual is short but pretty good, but I appreciate videos as well.
Great video! The Kontrast synth and Signs of Life are well worth the watch. I’m really excited to create some wavetables with images I’ve already taken and will now be looking for interesting images and samples to add to the Kontrast palette of sounds.
Here’s a fun little experiment. I took a photo of a tree during the winter that ended up being the cover of an album I put together years ago, dropped it on the wavetable window in Kontrast, and then created a simple new preset around it.
Here’s the sound it created (very simple scan back and forth with reverb added to cut down the buzziness of what I assume are the inharmonics created by the complexity of the wave forms in the image):
Nice!
You are right - the buzzyness comes from the high-frequency content in the tree.
You can use the BLUR dial and also change the scanline to more of a circular shape to get rid of the buzz. Or use the filter, of course.
Since my other hobby is photography, and I have had a longstanding interest in the intersection between audio and visual cues, references, and representations, I plan to dig into this further with creating lots of my own wavetables using various imagery.
I posted this same experiment with Kontrast on my own website, which focuses on the use of creativity (using photography and music as my examples) for improving and maintaining mental health (I am a psychotherapist during the day):
