Hearing the pieces
It’s one thing to see the partials and another to hear them. The matrix has two modes for that.
In solo mode, hover over any partial and you’ll hear only that one — the bare sine wave sitting at that frequency. Run your cursor up the stack and you can hear the fundamental, then the octave above, then the fifth above that, and on up. That climb is the harmonic series, audible one rung at a time.
In mute mode, it’s the opposite: hover over a partial and that one drops out while everything else keeps playing. This is how you hear what a given harmonic is contributing — pull the fundamental and the sound goes thin and hollow; pull an upper partial and the top loses a little air.
[Screenshot needed: solo/mute mode toggle on the partials matrix.]
Between them, these two modes are the fastest way to build an ear for what each part of the spectrum does. Most synths hide this behind a filter. Here it’s the main event.
Working with the partials
You don’t have to move every partial by hand. The matrix lets you shape the whole distribution at once — sweep the dot to bring partials in and out as a group, or restrict the active range to just the lowest few and concentrate everything there. There are some advanced partials further up the stack as well, past the point where the harmonics stop landing neatly on piano keys; the grid keeps showing them on the keyboard even when, strictly speaking, they’ve wandered off it.
The synth is showing you 25 partials. That’s enough to build any of the classic waveforms and a great deal that doesn’t have a name. Everything in the chapters ahead — the overtone scan, gin and tonic, the harmonic envelope — is a different way of moving or shaping the partials you set up here.
What to Practice
- Drag the dot slowly from the bottom of the matrix to the top while holding a note. Listen for the sine wave thickening into a sawtooth, and watch the scope change with it.
- Switch to solo mode and walk up the partials one at a time. See if you can hear the octave, then the fifth, then the next octave — the harmonic series in order.
- Switch to mute mode and pull the fundamental out, then put it back. Notice how much of the sound’s body lives in that one partial.
- Restrict the sound to just the bottom two or three partials and play a chord. That sparse setting is the starting point for a lot of the synth’s most useful sounds.
