Antares kantos 1.0 Owner's Manual

Audio controlled synthesizer

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  • Page 1 Owner’s Manual...
  • Page 2 ©2002 Antares Audio Technologies. All rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Antares Audio Technologies 231 Technology Circle Scotts Valley, California 95066 USA voice: (831) 461 7800 fax: (831) 461 7801 email: info@antarestech.com web: www.antarestech.com Printed in USA Rev 1.7rgb 09/2002...
  • Page 3 1. Use kantos 1.0 on only one computer. You may not: 1. Make copies of kantos 1.0 or of the user manual in whole or in part except as expressly provided for in this agreement. Your right to copy kantos 1.0 and the user manual is limited by copyright law. Making copies, verbal or media translations, adaptations, derivative works, or telecommunication data transmission of kantos 1.0 without prior...
  • Page 4 In the event of breach of any of the terms of this agreement, you shall pay the attorney’s fees of Antares that are reasonably necessary to enforce the agreement, plus resulting damages. LIMITED WARRANTY AND DISCLAIMER kantos 1.0 AND ACCOMPANYING MATERIALS ARE PROVIDED “AS IS”...
  • Page 5: Table Of Contents

    Contents How To Use This Manual Chapter 1 Installation and Chapter 2 Authorization Overview Chapter 3 Audio Input and Gate Generator Oscillators and Filters, Articulator, Noise Generator and Filter Modulation Matrix, LFOs, Envelope Generators, Delay, tempo Control, Sub-Mixer Main Mixer Tracking Tips Control Protocols Chapter 4...
  • Page 6 The Delay Delay Tempo Sync/Tap Tempo The Articulator Chapter 7 Modulation Mastery Chapter 8 What Is Modulation? The Gate Generator The Modulation Matrix Modulation Sources and Destinations LFOs, Tempo Sync/Tap Tempo About Envelopes Modulation Amount Destinations Triggering New Parts from Loops Creative Applications Chapter 9 Using kantos with guitar, polyphonic...
  • Page 7 Before proceeding, please register and authorize your copy of kantos 1.0. (You can skip ahead a few pages to the Authorization and Installation instructions. We’ll wait.) Also, if you plan to discard that lovely kantos 1.0 box, write down the serial number that appears on the bottom of the box for future reference.
  • Page 8: Technical Support

    Technical Support n the unlikely event that you experience a problem using kantos 1.0, try the following: 1. Make another quick scan through this manual. Who knows? You may have stumbled onto some feature that you didn’t notice the first time through.
  • Page 9: How To Use This Manual Chapter

    After that comes the payoff: set aside 67 minutes — the time needed to read the main part of the manual and do the tutorials — and you will well on your way to becoming a kantos 1.0 power user.
  • Page 10: Installation And

    (During this period, click the “Try It” button whenever you are presented with the Trial Period screen at launch.) But don’t procrastinate too long. After those ten days are up, you can’t launch kantos 1.0 until you enter the correct Response.
  • Page 11 If, for some reason, you do not have access to the web but do have email, copy and paste your Challenge string and registration code into an email along with your name and the product name (e.g., kantos 1.0 for MAS), and send it to: register@antarestech.com...
  • Page 12: Overview

    1.0 provides a variety of signal and processing modules; each serves a function in the creation of a kantos 1.0 preset. Let’s get an overview of these modules, then put them to use. (For brevity, we’ll refer to kantos 1.0 simply as kantos from here on.)
  • Page 13: Oscillators And Filters, Articulator

    Articulator This is the heart of kantos 1.0, and is making its debut on this planet for the first time. The Articulator can apply the harmonic content and formant information detected by its input section to the output of kantos’ sound sources.
  • Page 14: Modulation Matrix

    Modulation Matrix Although kantos 1.0 generates incredible expressive control from the input audio’s pitch, dynamics and harmonic characteristics, it also provides a flexible Modulation Matrix for an almost limitless variety of dynamic effects. Any source can control multiple destinations, and any destination can be controlled by multiple sources.
  • Page 15: Main Mixer

    Main Mixer and Output The main Mixer balances the main synth output, the delay line return, and, if desired, the original unprocessed input audio. If kantos has been instanti- ated as a mono in/stereo out plug-in, each of the main mixer inputs include a pan control.
  • Page 16: Control Protocols

    Chapter 4: Control Protocols Sliders Sliders have little blobs of light that you grab and move to change a parameter • SLIDER value. • For fine-tuning, hold down the • BLOB OF LIGHT Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) key while moving the slider. •...
  • Page 17: Fun With Oscillators

    Chapter 5: Fun With Oscillators and Filters Loading kantos Presets How you load presets depends on your sequencer. Cubase shows a strip along the bottom, like this: The tutorials always start with the kantos default preset. You do not need to load this preset;...
  • Page 18 TUTORIAL: GETTING TO KNOW THE OSCILLATORS Note: To hear the raw oscillator sound without processing, at the Articulator turn off the Osc1 In, Osc2 In, and Noise In buttons. You can also hear the raw oscillator sound by clicking on the Manual Gate button above the Gate Generator.
  • Page 19 • Cool! A pop-up menu appears with lots of waves. You can create your own too, or download new waves from www.antarestech.com. Choose some different waves, and note how they affect the sound. • If the oscillator waveform has a specific attack rather than just being a continuous waveform, click on the Retrigger button.
  • Page 20: The Filter

    The Filter The filter affects the oscillator’s frequency • spectrum. It can hype the highs, lower the lows, • FREQUENCY focus on a particular frequency, or add • BIAXIAL GRAPHIC vibrant (we’ve really ADJUSTER wanted to use that • MODE word!) resonant effects.
  • Page 21 Note that while this kind of real-time playing can be fun, the most common filter application is to add dynamic effects by controlling it with a signal such as input dynamics or an envelope. This routing would be done in the Modulation Matrix.
  • Page 22: The Chorus

    The Chorus Chorus is an effect that copies the oscillator sound, and detunes it in a periodic fashion (sort of like a slow, mild vibrato). Mixing the copied, modulated sound with the original oscillator produces a fat, animated effect. Not only do we now have the equivalent of two oscillators, the other oscillator has a chorus also, giving the equivalent of a four-oscillator synthesizer capable of generating downright corpulent timbres.
  • Page 23: Applied Mixology

    Chapter 6: Applied Mixology, Delay, and Tempo Sync Before getting into the Articulator, let’s get into the mixing capabilities. The Sub-Mixer kantos produces five audio sources for use in your final sound: • Oscillator 1: The sound of oscillator 1. •...
  • Page 24: The Main Mixer And Output

    Other Sub-Mixer controls are: • Solo button (one per channel). When enabled, this allows you to hear one channel (if its fader is up) while muting the rest. Multiple channels can be soloed. • Mute button (one per channel). When enabled, this silences the associated channel.
  • Page 25 Multiple channels can be muted. • Pan control. This places the channel output in the stereo field, from full left to full right, or anywhere in between. If kantos 1.0 has been instantiated as a mono in/stereo out plug-in, each of the main mixer inputs include a pan control.
  • Page 26 TUTORIAL: USING THE MIXER • Continue playing the VOCALS_WORDS.AIF file, and adjust the levels of the various Mixer sliders. Note how each element affects the sound. • Click on a channel’s Solo button to hear the channel by itself (assuming the channel’s fader is up).
  • Page 27 Delay Tempo Sync/Tap Tempo You can synchronize the delay time to song tempo in two ways: • Click your mouse button on the Tap button in the Tempo section, or hit the keyboard “T” key, on quarter notes of the song’s tempo. •...
  • Page 28 Chapter 7: The Articulator The Articulator is the heart of kantos 1.0. It uses the harmonic content and formant information detected by kantos 1.0’s input section, and applies that to the output of the oscillators and noise generator. The process is somewhat like a vocoder, which uses the harmonic content of a voice and applies that to an oscillator or other instrument.
  • Page 29 • Moving the dot to the upper right hand corner produces the maximum effect. This equals numerical values of 100% Q and 100% Amount. • The Formant Offset parameter shifts the input’s detected formants (overall harmonic structure) up or down in frequency, providing yet another twisted way to affect the sound’s character.
  • Page 30 Chapter 8: Modulation Mastery What Is Modulation? Modulation is the process of using a control signal to vary a sound-altering or sound-generating parameter. For a simple example, turning up an amp’s volume is an example of “modulating” the amplitude with a “control signal”...
  • Page 31 Floor: kantos ignores signals below this level. Set this above any hum, residual noise, etc. so kantos isn’t confused by these signals. Hold: Sets a minimum time before a note off occurs, regardless of what the input signal is doing. Note: kantos is happiest with a hot signal level.
  • Page 32 Here’s the final result. The bottom shows how the correct On and Off settings generate triggers that respond to the note duration. Note that kantos also tracks the dynamics, so the final result can sound as dynamic as the original signal. •...
  • Page 33: The Modulation Matrix

    • Set Input Level so that the input meter clip indicators flash on peaks. • Set the GG parameters as follows: On = 0 dB, off = -1 dB, floor = -80 dB, hold = approximately 100 ms. • Enable the Amp Envelope ON button. •...
  • Page 34: Modulation Sources

    • Determine how the source will affect the destination with the AMT slider (located between the Source and Destination boxes). Positive amounts add the source signal to the parameter. For example, when using the input signal dynamics to control filter frequency, a positive amount will kick the filter frequency higher with higher input dynam- ics.
  • Page 35: Modulation Destinations

    Modulation Destinations The 35 destinations are: OSCILLATOR/FILTER-RELATED PARAMETERS • Pitch 1 • Pitch 2 • Semitone 1 • Semitone 2 • Chorus Freq 1 • Chorus Depth 1 • Chorus Freq 2 • Chorus Depth 2 • Filter Freq 1 •...
  • Page 36 LFOs (Low Frequency Oscillators) LFOs generate low-speed control waveforms. We already had a close encoun- ter with an LFO when checking out the Chorus; the Chorus Rate and Level controls set the speed and depth of an LFO dedicated to the Chorus.
  • Page 37: About Envelopes

    • Click your mouse button on the Tap button in the Tempo section, or hit the keyboard “T” key, on quarter notes of the song’s tempo. The more taps you give kantos, the more accurate the reading because the taps are averaged over time.
  • Page 38 Here’s the deal with click/dragging: • Set attack time: Click in the rectangle containing the attack curve. If you host application supports custom cursors, the cursor changes to a double-arrow; drag left or right to change the attack time. • Set decay time and sustain level: Click in the decay or sustain section. The cursor turns into a quad arrow if your host can handle this.
  • Page 39 Triggering New Parts From Loops This is not a tutorial per se, but a demonstration of how you can use what you’ve learned about triggering and modulation to create entirely new parts from drum loops. We’ve included a few tutorial presets and an audio file for this purpose: •...
  • Page 41 Chapter 9: Creative Applications Using kantos with guitar While kantos is designed to be particularly effective with voice input, it also makes a killer monophonic guitar synth. For the best tracking from guitar input, follow these guidelines: • Drive kantos with a clean guitar sound. Processing with echo, delay, reverb or heavy distortion will compromise pitch tracking.
  • Page 42: Loop Applications

    • Experiment with different Gate Hold times to establish various rhyth- mic pulses. • Use the Pitch Constrain keyboards to limit the generated pitches to ones that will fit into your song’s harmonic structure. Select different notes in each of the Oscillators for interesting harmonic effects. •...
  • Page 43 Re-synthesizing a synth part Ever record a synth lead or bass part that sounded fine at the time, but when mixdown time rolled around, didn’t quite work with the rest of the parts? MIDI is a good way around that problem — just set a different synth patch, but use the MIDI data to drive it.
  • Page 44 Chapter 10: A Few Words About the Factory Presets nlike traditional MIDI synths, the sounds produced by kantos are defined not just by the presets, but also by the audio that drives them. Whenever a sound designer creates a MIDI preset, they can be sure that when anyone, anywhere plays C3 on a keyboard, they’ll hear exactly the same sound that the designer heard when they created the preset.
  • Page 45 • If a preset makes use of tempo synced LFOs or Delay, you will almost certainly have to readjust the tempo for your particular input. • We have included a selection of basic presets designed to serve more as examples and templates than finished presets. BasicVoice1 – 6 and BasicLoop1 –...
  • Page 46 Start up your host program, instantiate kantos, and verify that the extra waveforms have been added (they will appear at the end of the list). We’ll be posting new wavetables at the Antares web site, so stop by every now and then to check them out.
  • Page 47 Oscillator WHAT’S IT FOR? An oscillator creates the raw waveform that tracks the input, and can be processed by other kantos 1.0 modules. kantos 1.0 has two oscillators. WHAT ARE THE PARAMETERS? Each oscillator has the same parameters. NAME...
  • Page 48 Glide 0 to 100% Causes a note to slide to the next note instead of switching instantly. The higher the percentage, the longer the slide. Wave number limited Each wave provides a different oscillator only by computer sound storage Retrigger on/off When enabled, a new gate causes the oscillator to re-start its waveform at the...
  • Page 49 So there. Seriously, though, the Articulator uses the harmonic content and formant information detected by kantos 1.0’s input section, and applies that to any combination of oscillator outputs and the noise generator. This causes the output signal to take on some of the characteristics of the input signal.
  • Page 50 WHAT ARE THE PARAMETERS? NAME RANGE WHAT IT DOES Osc1 In On/off Feeds the Oscillator 1 output into the Articulator for processing Osc2 In On/off Feeds the Oscillator 2 output into the Articulator for processing Noise In On/off Feeds the Noise output into the Articulator for processing Amount 0 to 100%...
  • Page 51 Sub-Mixer WHAT’S IT FOR? The Sub-Mixer alters the levels of the basic kantos waveforms that make up the output. WHAT ARE THE PARAMETERS? NAME RANGE WHAT IT DOES Osc1 -∞ to +6dB Sets the level of the signal generated by Oscillator 1 Fund1 -∞...
  • Page 52: Gate Generator

    Input -∞ to 0dB Mixes the original input signal into the overall output Output -∞ to 0dB Sets the overall kantos level Mute On/off Each channel has a mute button. Enabling this takes the associated channel out of the mixer. The output mute silences kantos completely.
  • Page 53 Floor -80dB to -2dB kantos ignores signals below this level. Set this above any hum, residual noise, etc. so kantos isn’t confused by these signals. Hold 10 to 999ms Sets a minimum time before a note off occurs, regardless of the input signal status Manual Gate On/off Click on this to momentarily let the...
  • Page 54 -100 to +100% Sets how much of the modulation source affects the modulation destination, and whether the modulation adds to the destination parameter value (+ numbers) or subtracts from it (- numbers). Destination 36 options Chooses one of 35 modulation destina- including tions, including the modulation amount none...
  • Page 55 WHAT ARE THE PARAMETERS? Parameters are changed either by entering a value in the numeric field, or clicking within the area indicated by the graphic and dragging. NAME RANGE WHAT IT DOES A(ttack) 1 to 999ms After triggering, this is the time required to go from full off to maximum level D(ecay) 1 to 999ms...
  • Page 57 Buttons 8 Numericals 8 amplitude envelope 23, 24, 26 Sliders 8 AMT slider 26 Creative Applications 33 Antares Audio Technologies ii Articulation Q 27 Articulator 5, 20, 36, 41 Amount 42 D(ecay) 46, 47 Emphasis High 42 Delay 6, 18, 19, 42, 43, 47...
  • Page 58 Filter 12, 27, 41 Active 41 LFO1 26, 47 bandpass 2 pole 13 LFO2 26, 47 bandpass 4 pole 13 LFOs (Low Frequency Oscillators) 6, 28, 45 Freq 41 Freq 45 Frequency 12 LFO Tempo Sync/Tap Tempo 28 highpass 2 pole 13 LFO1 26 highpass 4 pole 13 LFO2 26...
  • Page 59 Modulation Matrix 6, 25, 45 Oscillator/Filter -Related Parameters Amt 46 Chorus Depth 1 27 Destination 46 Chorus Depth 2 27 Source 45 Chorus Freq 1 27 Chorus Freq 2 27 Modulation sources Filter Freq 1 27 Amp envelope 26 Filter Freq 2 27 Input dynamics 26 Filter Freq 3 27 Input pitch 26...
  • Page 60 Tutorials 10 Constraining Pitch 11 Q 12, 20, 21, 41, 42 Getting To Know The Oscillators 10 Kool Articulator Fun! 21 Messin’ Around With Delay 19 R(elease) 46, 47 Setting Gate Generator Parameters 24 Rate 40 The Biaxial Graphic Adjuster 12 Re-synthesizing a synth part 35 Triggering New Parts From Loops 31 Reference 39...

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