Crystal Tutorial

What's Crystal?
Crystal is a semi-modular software synthesizer featuring both subtractive synthesis and frequency modulation (FM) synthesis. It offers abundant modulation control with over 90 parameters which may be modulated, multi-stage envelopes with graphical editors, extensive tempo sync of envelopes/lforates/delay times, built-in effects for chorus/flanging/comb filtering/echoes, and a band splitter for effects processing by frequency band. Not only that, Crystal has wave sequencing, granular synthesis, program morphing, MIDI learn, and imports soundfonts. The musical applications for Crystal are literally boundless.

Crystal is a plugin, which means it runs within a host, such as Cubase, Orion, Logic, Fruity Loops, etc.

Download Crystal for Windows

Getting Started With Crystal Patch Editing

In this tutorial, we'll make a simple patch, a sound with some changing characteristics. The goal is to acquaint you with some of the techniques that you can use to create your own patches with Crystal. Don't worry, this will only serve as an easy introduction to working with Crystal, so there's nothing to fear.

Start
Start by launching your VSTi host (I'm using cubase) and loading Crystal. Set it up so that your keyboard is connected to Crystal and make sure you're hearing the Crystal presets. Listen to a few of the presets to make sure you've got everything in working order.
To begin with, we'll need a blank canvas on which we'll create our sound. To get a good starting point, choose one of the presets named "unused", at the end of the presets menu, which has most of the parameters in a simple state suitable for creating a new patch.

Voices
The controls in Crystal are organized into 5 pages and you select a page by clicking on the tabs across the top of the window. Click on "Voice1" to go to the page with the controls for voice number 1. Notice that the Voice 1 page is organized into 3 regions: Oscillator, Filter, and Amplitude. The Oscillator controls are used to create the wave that you hear, the Amplitude controls determine how loud it is at different points in time, and the Filter controls are used to add and subtract certain frequencies from the wave to give it interesting characteristics.
Go ahead and play a note. Watch the waveform display while you play a note. As you can see in the waveform display, what you are hearing is a sawtooth wave, named because the waveform looks like the teeth on a saw. We want to start with a mellower tone, so choose "Sine" from the "Type" menu in the "Oscillator" section of the page. Next, choose "-1" from the "Octave" menu to lower the pitch by one octave.

Now let's move on to the Amplitude controls which make the sound louder or softer over time. We won't need all the points that are in the envelope for this example, so choose 5 from the Points menu. Drag the blue point at the left to the bottom of the window and drag the yellow point to the top until it has a piano-like sound when you play a note.

Next, make the loudness of the voice respond to the velocity of the key press by turning up the VelSens control. This makes the loudness sensitive to how hard you press a key.

Next, let's use the filter for Voice 1. Choose "Env On" from the menu at the top of the Filter section. Choose "5" from the Points menu to reduce the number of points in the envelope. Turn on the "Sync" button for the filter envelope. This synchronizes the envelope with the tempo of the song. In this mode, the numbers you see in the envelope (for example the "1") correspond to beats. That means each vertical line you see in the envelope corresponds to a 1/16 note.

Drag the right-most blue point all the way to the right. Drag the red point to the top of the window on the vertical line marked "1". This means when you play a note, the end point will be reached one beat later. Since the red point is all the way at the top, the filter frequency will be at its maximum value.

Drag the green point to the middle vertical line. This corresponds to a 1/8 note after you play a note. Drag it downward and watch the parameter display under the Poly button. Keep dragging it downward until the parameter display shows a value below 1kHz (for example, 0.98kHz). Now when you play a note, there is a dip in the filter frequency that is synchronized to the tempo of your song.

Now, let's duplicate this first voice into Voice 2. Choose "Copy Voice 1" from the Utility menu to the right of the Poly button. Next, choose "Paste to Voice 2" from the Utility menu. This makes voice 2 a duplicate of voice 1.

Next, let's make voice 2 slightly different than voice 1. Go to the voice 2 page by clicking on the Voice 2 tab at the top of the window. Change the waveform for voice 2 by choosing "Smooth" from the Type menu in the Oscillator section. Notice how you can now hear two distinct voices when you play a note?

Modulation
We've got two voices playing. Now let's add some movement to the sound through the use of modulation. Go to the modulation page by clicking on the Modulation tab at the top of the window. The Modulation page has a Modulation Matrix section which has six rows with four controls in each row. Choose "LFO1" from the "Source" menu in the first row and "Voice1 Pan" from the "Target" menu in that same row.
If it isn't already highlighted, click on the "1" button in the LFOs section to view LFO number 1 (there are a total of 6 LFOs to choose from). When you play a note, notice how Voice 1 pans from left to right in a motion that corresponds to the purple ball in the LFOs section. Turn down the Rate control to slow the LFO and notice how the left/right pan of Voice 1 slows down.

Turn on the "Sync" control for LFO1 to synchronize the LFO with the song tempo. Now adjust the rate control until the parameter display shows "0.50 cpb". In other words the pan will go from left to right once per 1/4 note (half a cycle per beat).

Next, let's add some interactive modulation by controlling the FM Index parameter of voice 2 with a MIDI controller. In the second row of the Modulation Matrix, choose MIDI CC Learn from the Source menu. Now twirl any knob on your MIDI controller. For example, move your mod wheel. Crystal will note which MIDI controller you moved and will use that in row 2 of the Modulation Matrix. Now choose Voice 2 FM Index for the target in row 2. Try it out by turning up your MIDI controller to add some growl to Voice 2.

Patch Management with Crystal's Patch Bank Browser
Other tutorials in this series cover creating new patches, but here's a tutorial about how to manage the patches you already have.
This tutorial uses the patch bank browser in version 2.2.1, so if you haven't downloaded it yet, get it at the Crystal web site . If you've got the latest version, you should see a section labelled "Browser" on Crystal's Modulation page.

Getting Started
First, a couple of terminology items: I use the term "patch" to mean a snapshot of of synth settings. This comes from the old days when synths were programmed using patch cables to connect one module to another. Another term that means the same thing is "program".
I use the term "preset" to mean a patch which has been loaded into Crystal. Crystal has room for 128 presets and all 128 form a "bank". This bank of presets is saved with your song, so when reopen your song, any edits you made to those presets are restored. That's great because you'll always get your project faithfully restored when you open it later.

However, sometimes you may want to reuse patches that you created in one song in another song. It is generally difficult to retrieve a preset from one song and use it in another. That's where .fxp and .fxb files come in. If your plugin host support import and export of .fxb and .fxp files, you can save a preset patch to a .fxp file or the entire bank of presets to a .fxb file. You can then go to another song and load one patch into Crystal by importing a .fxp file, or you can load an entire bank of patches by importing the .fxb file. When importing a .fxp file, the current preset (as selected from the preset menu) is overwritten with the imported patch. When importing a .fxb, the entire bank of presets is overwritten with the patches from the .fxb file.

If your host does not support import and export of .fxb and .fxp flies, that's no problem because .fxb files of Crystal patches are readily available and Crystal itself contains a patch browser which can read .fxb files and can write individual presets to an existing .fxb file.

Before we go further, familiarize yourself with a few Crystal controls. The first is the "Utility" menu. This is the menu just to the right of the "Poly" button. This menu has the VoiceCopy and VoicePaste items we used in the last tutorial. Below the Utility menu is the "Presets" menu. It's the downward pointing arrow. When you popup that menu, it shows you all 128 presets currently loaded into Crystal. To the left of the Presets menu are a pair of arrows, one pointing left and one pointing right. These step through the presets. On Crystal's Modulation page you'll find the "Browser" section. This section contains the "Bank" menu and the "Patches" menu.

Making a Library of Patch Banks
Ok, now that we've got the preliminaries out of the way, let's get going.
Create an empty folder named "CrystalPatchBanks". On the mac, put that CrystalPatchBanks folder into the Preferences folder in your System Folder. On windows, put the CrystalPatchBanks folder into the plugins folder where you have Crystal.dll. On OSX, put the CrystalPatchBanks folder into the /Users//Library/Preferences folder.

Now download 4 .fxb files from the Patches page on the Crystal web site by clicking on the links for "Vintage1", "Ambient1", "Motifs1", and "Factory Presets". After you uncompress the files, you should have 4 files:

Vintage1.fxb
Ambient1.fxb
Motifs1.fxb
FactoryPresets.fxb
There is also a Crystal21 presets bank on that page, but don't download that. Now, put these four files into the CrystalPatchBanks folder.

Have Fun With Patch Banks
Now start up Crystal. Crystal comes preloaded with 128 preset patches, so you'll always find those on the preset menu when you start Crystal. I'm kind of fond of many of those presets, but there are only 128 to choose from. Having lots of things to choose from is usually good in life, so we want more patches to choose from. That's where the Patch Bank Browser comes in.
Find the Patch bank browser: click on the "Browse" tab in the "Patches" section on the Modulation page. Go to the Banks menu in the Browser. On that menu, you'll see the names of the 4 patch banks you put in your CrystalPatchBanks folder (Don't see them? Then go back and make sure the folder is named and located according to the instructions above or choose "Banks" from that menu to refresh the menu.). Choose "Vintage1.fxb". If you click on the "Patches" menu, you'll now see a list of names, starting with "HackSaw". These are the names of the patches in that .fxb patch bank file. Choosing a patch from this menu will load that patch into the current preset. Go ahead and choose "HackSaw". Play a note and you'll hear an analog-style patch. Also note that the name "HackSaw" now appears in the Parameter Display below the Poly button. That serves as confirmation that the patch was imported from the .fxb file into the current preset.

See those two arrows, pointing left and right below the patches menu? Those step through the patches in the selected patch bank file. Go ahead and click on the right arrow a few times, playing a note each time to listen to the result. Note how each time you click on the right arrow, the parameter display is updated to show the name of a new patch. If you click on the patches menu again, you'll the names of the patches you've been importing.

So what is happening when we import a patch? The current preset is overwritten with the imported patch. That means if you're looking for several patches to use in your song, you can browse until you find one you like. Then, change the current patch by using the presets menu and start browsing again, importing into the next preset slot. Using that technique you can import up to 128 patches into Crystal's presets.

If you've browsed through the entire "Vintage1.fxb" patch bank file, go to the Banks menu and choose another bank file and start browsing through that. By doing this you have hundreds of patches at the tips of your fingers, accessible with just one or two mouse clicks!

Patch Strategies
If you're like me, you sometimes use Crystal for mutliple parts in a song, using a different patch each time. You can do this by using multiple instances of Crystal. Using the browsing described above, you can browse and import a different patch for each instance.
Many times though, you run out of Crystal instances, either because of cpu limitations or space in Cubase's instrument rack. In that case, the best thing to do is to print the Crystal part to disk (sometimes called freeze). That way you capture the audio, thus freeing up the Crystal instance to be used on another part. What I do in this case, is save the midi track in case I want to go back to it later. I name the midi track with the name of the patch I used. When I start on the next part, I step to the next preset using the right arrow next to the presets menu and browse for a patch to use on the next part.

I've done songs where I've repeated this process many times. However, when I save the song I save all the midi tracks, the audio track for each one, and since the preset I used for each track is in a different preset slot in Crystal, they are all saved as well.

Other Neat Things
When you import a patch, it overwrites the current preset. What if you did that by accident and want the overwritten preset? No problem, just choose "Revert" from the Utility menu.
Also, since importing a patch overwrites the current preset, that means the original Crystal presets will be overwritten as you import patches. What if you later want to use one of those original presets? No problem. That's why we downloaded the FactoryPresets.fxb bank. If you browse that bank, you'll find all the original preset patches. In fact, you may want to load the unused.fxb bank from the yahoo files area into Crystal before you start browsing. That way you'll only be overwriting unused patches.

Of course, many times when you import a patch, you'll end up tweaking it before you're happy with it. Because it is imported into a preset, your tweaks will be saved with your song. But, what if you want to use that tweaked version in another song? No problem. Notice how the Vintage1, Ambient1, and Motifs1 banks have unused patches? Those are for you to add your own patches. Say you imported "HackSaw", but tweaked it to make it just right for your song and now you want to make it easy to use that tweaked version in another song.

First rename it by clicking on the parameter display and typing in a name, for example "MyHackSaw".
If it isn't already selected, choose "Vintage1.fxb" from the Banks menu. This means we're going to write the MyHackSaw patch to the Vintage1.fxb bank file.
Now choose "unused" from the Write menu (below the Patches menu). This writes MyHackSaw into the slot previously occupied by the unused patch. Popup up the Patches menu and you'll now see MyHackSaw in the menu of patches for Vintage1.fxb. If you later, in a different song want to use MyHackSaw, simply browse to Vintage1.fxb using the browser and you'll have MyHackSaw right there waiting for you in the Patches menu.

Voice Copying
This is a tutorial about voice copying. This is an effective technique that I use a lot, and is very useful, but it is simple and easy.
I'll be using the "unused" patch for this example. You'll find this at the end of the presets menu in Crystal. It is like the "blank slate" that thoke referred to when he uploaded his virgin bank. So, if you're playing along at home, bring up Crystal and choose "unused" from the presets menu.

Crystal offers three "Voices". A Voice is the source of a sound. Other synths often refer to the sound source as an oscillator, but in Crystal the oscillator is just one element of the voice. You can turn the individual voices on and off with the Voice buttons under the logo on the Crystal window, and you can visit the parameters for each voice by choosing the Voice tabs at the top of the window.

With 3 voices, there are countless interesting ways to blend sounds. You can blend contrasting sounds to make intricate patches. For example the "Swept Away" preset uses 3 very different voices to get an evolving sound. Or you can blend similar sounds. The "Bigness MW" preset blends 3 similar voices, but varies them in ways to get a full sound.

One technique for blending multiple voices to create a fuller sound is detuning. In this technique, you employ multiple voices which are identical except that the tuning varies slightly.

This is where voice copying comes in. We want to take the "unused" and give it a fuller sound by detuning multiple copies of the same voice.

If you listen to "unused", it is a very simple sound, which is the whole idea since it is intended to be the starting point for patch creation. Let's beef it up a bit by making a second, detuned voice. Choose "Copy Voice1" from the utility menu, next to the "Poly" button. Then choose "Paste to Voice2" from the same menu. This copies all the parameters from the "Voice 1" page and pastes them into the "Voice 2" page. If you flip back and forth between those two pages, you'll see that they are now identical. If you play a note, it will sound the same as before, only louder. Now adjust the "Fine tune" parameter on Voice 2 slightly, by turning it up to 0.12. Watch the parameter display under the "Poly" button to see the value you are selecting. Now play a note and you can hear that it has a fuller sound.

You can choose "Paste to Voice3", and adjust the "Fine tune" for voice 3 to -0.12 to get a sound that is fuller still. As you can see on the utility menu, there are also options for copying voices 2 and 3, so you can copy/paste between any pair of voices.

Voice copying is very useful when working on a patch where the voices are similar. Note the parameters of the Mixer page are not affected by the paste, so if you're working on a patch where the only differences between the voices are the routings on the Mixer page, you can copy and paste the voices without overwriting those settings.

SawSquare Oscillator Type
You'll find SawSquare in the Type menu in the Oscillator section of each voice page. This menu controls the waveform which produces the sound for each of Crystal's 3 voices. You'll notice that the menu is divided into sections. The upper section has synthesized waveforms and the lower section has sampled waveforms. The synthesized waveforms give you more control over the sound, but the sampled waveforms, since they are sampled from nature, are more complex.
If you've added your own samples to Crystal you'll see a third section on this menu which contains your samples. To learn more about this feature in Crystal, see the SoundFont section of the Crystal users guide (and there will be a future tutorial on this topic).

Try this: select one of the "Unused" presets at the end of Crystal's preset menu. Select the "Voice 1" page using the tabs at the top of the window. Choose "SawSquare" from the Type menu in the Oscillator section of the page. Now play a note. Notice the traditional square wave sound?

Like many things in Crystal, the SawSquare oscillator type provides a non-traditional approach to getting unique sounds. Conventional synthesizers offer a square wave and a sawtooth wave, or perhaps more than one kind of each of these two types of waves. Crystal offers an infinite variety of combinations of these two basic waveforms.

The Pulse Mix slider controls the blending of sawtooth to square. When this slider is all the way down (to the left), the waveform is a sawtooth. When it is all the way up, the type is square. In between values give you hybrid waveforms which blend these two basic waveforms.

Try this: Make sure you've got the Type set to "SawSquare" and turn the Pulse Mix slider all the way down and play a note. Note the buzzy, agressive sound you normally associate with a sawtooth? That's Crystal's special analog-style sawtooth. You can watch Crystal's oscilloscope and see the jagged shape of the waveform which gives it its name.

Now turn the Pulse Mix all the way up and play a note. Hear the hollow, woody sound of a square wave? Here's a cool thing about Crystal though: Move the Pulse Mix slider to values in between these two extremes and you can get an infinite variety of sawtooth/square hybrid waveforms.

One fun thing you can do with square waves is to vary the width of the square part, or "pulse" of the waveform. That's what the Pulse Width slider is for. Turn the Pulse Mix slider all the way up and try moving the Pulse Width slider to different positions. When it is near the middle, you'll get a thin, reedy sound. When it all the way up or all the way down. you'll get a woody, hollow sound. Note that with Crystal you get a different kind of hollow sound when the Pulse Width slider is all the way up compared to when it is all the way down.