Patching in Sines

video upload by boxoftextures

"Sines, a new synthesizer from Cherry Audio. They're on a serious roll this year with new stuff! At first glance there's a billion controls and it seems like you'll never figure it out, but once you spend a few minutes with it things turn out to make a lot of sense. You have four oscillators, four LFOs, four envelope generators, and four slots in the modulation matrix. That last one may seem like an oddly small number but almost every control has its own mod routing, so in a way those four are like a few bonus extra ones.

The oscillators are, well, unique. For one, there's no waveshapes to choose from, it's all and only sine waves. Which seems odd at first! But like the mod matrix, you have a lot of controls to mess with the sines and create all kinds of different tones. It only took a few minutes of knob twiddling to see how it worked, and there's lots of possibility in the design. With all the modulation and tone shaping you can do I found that most of my early patches used only one oscillator. They just sound that rich. One of the patches in the video uses three of them, and I almost had to force myself to do that. And in fact, I'm planning on going back into that one and splitting it up, using the first two oscillators in a new patch and the third one in another.

So bottom line is that at first glance everything about Sines is just weird. Which is true! But it all makes sense and is really well designed, and the sound design possibilities are pretty deep.

As always, all patches are mine, and the end theme under the credits is two of the patches from the video over top of the drone I always use in my opening titles (which I made sometime in the distant past)."