Sculpt — Shaping the Spectrum

The bars

The 24 bars are multipliers on whatever the matrix is already producing. The midline is unity — leave a bar there and that partial is untouched. Drag a bar up to boost it (to twice its level) or down to cut it (all the way to silence). The bars use a square-root taper, so the quiet upper harmonics stay easy to grab instead of vanishing into the bottom pixel. Draw a comb — every other bar up — and you get a hollow, clarinet-like tone; carve a notch and you’ve removed a region by hand.

Morph

Morph is the fast way to a shape. It sweeps the bars between the four classic waveforms — saw, square (sqr), triangle (tri), and pulse (puls) — with a snap detent at each pure shape. The clever part: it accounts for the engine’s natural roll-off, so when you land on “square” it genuinely looks and sounds like a square wave, not an approximation. Morph is the quickest way to a familiar starting point you can then sculpt away from.

Blend — into resonant noise

This is the slider that takes BKS Harmonic somewhere other synths don’t go. Blend crossfades the whole Sculpt spectrum from additive (left — the pure summed partials we’ve been working with) to resonant (right). On the resonant side, the sound is no longer built from clean sine waves; it’s white noise run through sharp, high-Q peaks tuned to the same harmonics. You’re pulling pitched tones out of noise. The result is breathy and vocal — formant-like, alive in a way pure partials aren’t. Park it anywhere between for a sound that’s part tone, part air.

Air

Air only does anything once you’ve blended toward resonant. It globally widens the resonant peaks (toward airy — breathier, noisier) or narrows them (toward tight — more pitched and focused). 50 is neutral. Think of it as how cleanly the noise resolves into pitch: tight for a clear note, airy for a breath of wind with a pitch hiding inside.

The phase row

Below the bars is a row of small Ø buttons — one per partial — that invert that partial’s phase. A specialist tool, but flipping a partial’s phase can hollow out or thicken a sound in ways a level cut can’t.

What to Practice

• Set the bars flat, then use Morph to find a square wave. Now drag a few individual bars to sculpt away from it.
• Sweep Blend slowly from additive to resonant on a held chord. Hear the tone turn breathy as the partials become noise-through-peaks.
• With Blend on the resonant side, move Air from tight to airy and back. That’s the dial between “pitched” and “windy.”