Advanced FM with Kilohearts Phase Plant and other modulation types
Learn Advanced FM tips using Kilohearts Phase Plant to improve your synthesis and to create unique sounds.
Kilohearts Phase Plant is quickly becoming my favourite plugin, however if handles FM very differently to other plugins, let’s discuss.
One of the greatest, albeit a bit confusing, aspect of Kilohearts Phase Plant is the truly unique modulation system. It handles modulation in a very modular fashion, allowing for connections from a multitude of audio outputs to inputs to control Frequency Modulation, Amplitude Modulation and Phase Modulation – or stack them up in interesting ways for endless combinations. You can even inter-modulate the modulators for all sorts of weird effects.
Kilohearts Phase Plant deals with filters in a rather unique way too, here you can load a filter in your generator section or the effects rack. Furthermore, within the generator section, you can send audio-rate modulation to control the frequency of the filter – with a high “Q” or resonance, you can create some interesting distortions.
The visual approach here is fantastic, you can quickly tell the difference between audio-rate modulations (displayed with green nodes) and regular modulations (displayed with orange nodes), you can even set a regular LFO or envelope modulation to control the amount of audio-rate modulation – simple hover over the destination and click on the yellow node that appears.
Using groups can declutter your patch and speed up workflow…
The grouping in the generators section is also incredibly intuitive, you can either group all of your modulations together and hide them to not clutter the interface, or you can create a multitude of “voices” where each group contains an oscillator and a modulator and then route those through the separate effects racks in Kilohearts Phase Plant.
The capabilities are so vast, the just using some tricky routing and modulations you can take simple sine waves all the way into complex and metallic territory and everywhere in between.
If you’re not following, don’t worry – there is a video walkthrough of a couple of the techniques and ideas, check it out here:
[youtube_sc url=”https://youtu.be/JnjuJ3Gbmbs”]
