Curve Tutorials

How to make a "correct" preset

Curve invites everyone to share their preset creations with others. A vital community and fresh sounds which are opposed to public voting make it not only interesting for everyone to use new sounds, but also for the creator to find out what ratings they can achieve with their sounds.

This tutorial will help you in making your presets playable, to make sure they are in tune, and that all presets share a common volume level. Make sure that your presets satisfy quality needs, and you can take an important step to getting highest votes.

Correct volume

It's useful if all presets share a common volume level. Our tip is this: First, set the volume slider of your host sequencer to 0dB. Then adjust Curve's "Preset Volume" setting so that your host sequencer shows a volume between -3dB and 0dB while playing one note at a time at a high velocity.

Correct pitch

Make sure your sound is in tune. If it's not a drum or FX sound, this is vital, so that your sounds play in tune with the rest of the song:

• At least one of the three OSCs that you can use should serve as the main oscillator, with having pitch set to 0, or to a multiple of 12 semitones.
• "Detune" can come in handy for creating fat patches by detuning one OSC opposite to another one. If you do this, it is for example good to set one OSC to "-8" and another one to "+8". Setting one to "0" and the other one to "+16" would detune the resulting sound.
• If you modulate pitch with an envelope (EG 1 or EG 2), the pitch will be changed unless sustain is set to 0.
• If you modulate pitch via an LFO please make sure that the sound does not get out of tune.

Make use of velocity, modwheel and aftertouch

The standard behavior is routing velocity to volume. It is a plus and most fun if your presets makes use of modwheel and aftertouch as well, and maybe it makes sense to influence not only volume via velocity. For example velocity and aftertouch could influence the filter cutoff, modwheel might influence LFO speed, etc.

Make use of keytrack

By default, the filter's cutoff frequency is static, but it might be better if it changes according to the note that you play. That's where keytrack comes in. If you set keytrack to 100, the cutoff frequency is doubled for every octave above C3, and halved by every octave below C3.

Do you have any feedback for us on this tutorial, things that we should improve, or wishes for new topics that we should cover? Contact us and let us know!