- What kind of sounds can a synthesizer make with only two sine waves? Stephan Schmitt would tell you that in the right system, a handful of sine waves are all you need to create an entire world of sound. In 1996, he founded the small audio software company you now know as Native Instruments. He's the brains behind NI instruments like Spark, Prism, and Skanner. With that backdrop, it's worth special consideration when he releases something new, and Kontour, his latest project, is no exception.
Although it was introduced as part of the recent Komplete 10 suite, the narrative of this unassuming plug-in is surprisingly long and storied. The initial inspiration was a Reaktor ensemble called Weedbacker created over 15 years ago by an inventive Reaktor creator named Siegmar Kreie. What set it apart from other instruments was the rather clever use of feedback as a means of sound generation. Schmitt borrowed some of these foundational ideas when designing Spark, released in 2008 after a lengthy development cycle that reportedly included 160 different versions. Spark is certainly a worthy instrument on its own, but Schmitt saw more potential in his creation. The first of these offspring was CHA-OSC, a 2009 Reaktor ensemble released as a free holiday gift for the Reaktor community. In 2011, Schmitt formed a new company called Nonlinear Labs, with a goal of creating a hardware synthesizer. The software prototype of this instrument was a continued evolution of Spark, and NI designers worked with Nonlinear Labs to convert the prototype into what eventually became Kontour.
Kontour is at its core a two-operator FM synth. Technically speaking, it's a phase modulation synth. (You can ready about the difference between the two here.) The two operators are really just sine wave oscillators, each with its own dedicated sine wave shaper. The controls are pretty basic—you can set the pitch of the oscillator and configure the shaper. Where things get interesting is in the phase modulation controls. Kontour's oscillator modules allow you to set the amount of phase modulation from their own output as well as that of the other module. A huge range of possible timbres can result when using different pitch values for the oscillators, from brass sounds to distortion. To help shape the effect of this distortion, Kontour provides the same advanced style envelopes from Spark for each oscillator. These let you set two different decay slopes, and they can be assigned to control the phase modulation and wave shaper drive in addition to the oscillator level. The oscillators can be freely routed to two filter modules. The first is a comb filter that can pull quadruple duty as a tunable resonator, an all-pass filter and a low-pass filter. This can be used to add the usual comb filter-style effects (like those discussed here), and the resonator factor allows Kontour to mimic plucked strings or struck bells nicely. The other filter is a more straightforward, state-variable filter that lets you crossfade from low-pass to high-pass mode, with band-pass in between.
Coming out of the filters, the signal passes through two different mixer modules. The output mixer sets the levels of both oscillator modules and both filters independently before passing the mix off into Kontour's effect bus, which includes cabinet, gap filter, flanger, echo and reverb modules. In between, there's another opportunity to rub some dirt on the signal via an additional sine shaper. The other mixer module is a feedback mixer that lets you route the signal coming out of the filters or the effect bus back to the beginning of the signal chain, much in the same way as on Weedbacker.
Everything I've described thus far is actually contained in the secondary View B of Kontour. Switching to View A shows off a reduced set of macro controls designed to introduce playability and movement to your sounds. There are four macro knobs available, and each has a distinct purpose indicated by its name. To that end, the list of parameters that each macro can affect is predetermined by the designers. The Drama macro is fairly obvious with its intentions, and it can be mapped to targets like effect levels and envelope sustain. The Color 1 and Color 2 macros are designed to change the color of the sound by influencing the brightness and the amount of resonance, respectively. Finally, the Loudness macro is another somewhat obvious one that can be mapped to the mixer levels and saturation. While some may find this macro hardwiring to be an odd choice, it does lend a sense of cohesion to the instrument as a whole—no matter what preset you've got loaded, you can reach for these four macros and pretty much know what you're going to get.
Sitting below the macro knobs in View A is the Motion Recorder, which is a bit like an ultra-flexible LFO. Although only one is displayed at a time, each macro has its own motion recorder that loads one of 12 waveform presets. When you begin playback in your DAW, if the macro is enabled for motion playback (via the play button) it will jump into action according to the preset waveform shown in the display. As you might have guessed by the name, you can also record your own motion data by clicking the record button and entering your own automation with your mouse or a hardware controller. Kontour gives you quite a bit of control over the playback of the motion recorder; you can set a loop range, alter the playback mode and speed and even adjust the smoothness of the automation.
For many users, Kontour's beefy preset library, combined with the macro and motion recorders provided in View A, will be all users need to get their money's worth out. The 378 sounds included show off the immense range made possible by the clever design at the foundation of Kontour. Some of its sounds would simply be unreachable by subtractive synthesis. For users willing to look deeper (and dig into the manual), Kontour provides a great way to gain an understanding of more advanced synthesis techniques. It's not the lightest on the CPU—one instance ate about 30% of the horsepower on my Macbook Pro)—but the tradeoff is worth it for this unique instrument.
Ratings:
Cost: 4.4
Versatility: 4.6
Sound: 4.8
Ease of use: 4.1