Nylon: Geometric oscillators and explorative sound design
Nylon from Wave Casual is a cool looking synthesizer that uses oscillators based on geometry to define the timbre via a circular path. Then it’s all morphing, modulation and movement for there into unexplored sounds.
Nylon
Now, this is a lovely looking piece of software, all clean lines, soft greys and gorgeously animated bezier curves. The idea is that you start your journey with two circular oscillators, then using 4 points on the circumference you can pull and shape it into all sorts of different curvy shapes. These translate to the increasing complexity of the resulting waveform. You can shape either or both oscillators and then morph between them. You can do this manually or employ the row of modulators at the bottom.
From there the rest uses regular synthesizer architecture with 2 filters with drive, two amplifiers with distortion, and a chorus and delay at the bottom. The output of each oscillator can be mixed through both filters if you wish before hitting the amplifier and effects.
Wave Casual Nylon · Source: Robin Vincent
There are 6 modulators at the bottom, two are dedicated envelopes to the amplifiers but the other 4 can be directed to anything you like with a simple drag and drop. They can either be an ADSR envelope or an LFO with some nice control over the starting point, phase and development over time. At the bottom right there’s an “analysis” window giving you a display of the waveshape.
The interface and workflow are deliciously simple while offering a comprehensive range of sound and movement. Simply playing with the shape of the oscillators is completely fascinating. It has a slightly unusual preset system where each preset is like a card with a name, description, category tags and the name of the author. This will lead to a shared online preset library which presumably you could contribute to. A simpler way to just step through presets would be nice though.
Nylon is available now for €89.90 for MacOS or Windows.
More information
- Nylon website.
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