Kilohearts Toolbox Starter

Snap Heap: Modular effects playground

The Kilohearts Snapin framework is the easiest, most creative, sound design workflow you have ever come across.

Wha Wha What's it all about?

Managing effects is something that's possible in pretty much every digital audio workstation out there, but managing effect chains can be cumbersome and tedious. With Snap Heap managing complex effect systems is super simple and nothing stands between your creativity and the speaker cones.

Fast lane to success

Snap Heap is based around up to 4 routable lanes of modular "snapin" effects. Each lane can contain any number of snapins, and have individual gain, panning and dry/wet mixing. You can also move things around easily using a state of the art technology from the future of 1984 called "drag and drop".

Modulation station

While adding four filters a frequency shifter and a stereo width modifier can be interesting in itself, adding four filters with sweeping cutoff retriggered by audio threshold, a frequency shifter bound to the MIDI note and stereo width scaled by the input RMS can be... Well, probably strange. But it may be amazing, and trying it out is just a couple of clicks away. Try it!

We're serial about parallelizing

Sometimes you want effects to run in series, and sometimes you want them to run in parallel. In Snap Heap, switching between the two is as easy as the push of a button. Clicking the route button between two lanes links them together in parallel mode, running the same audio through both before mixing them together. Want all four lanes to go in parallel, or have two parallel with pre and post FX, or just about anything else? The choice is yours!

You have to focus, Trinity

When you're tweaking a specific effect in the chain, the other effects involved can sometimes make it hard to properly hear what's going on. Mute or solo effect lanes, to quickly home in on what you're doing. Snap Heap will take care of sorting out the routing so you hear just what you want to hear.

Honey, I'm 4 ms late

Don't worry about latency. No matter how you route things or what effects you add, Snap Heap makes sure everything is as in sync as they can be to make sure all modulation aligns properly and to avoid phasing issues.

What's a Snapin?

Well, snapins are regular old VST/AU plugins that you can use for a multitude of purposes. They come in a bunch of different flavours and we create more all the time. The thing is that they also work as modular effect pieces that you can combine in our snapin host plugins, as you can see above. Nifty!

To give you some feel for what you can do with snapins these first 6 are on the house!

3-band EQ: Simple EQ

3-band EQ will get you surprisingly far when it comes to shaping your sound, or your entire song. By dragging the split frequencies around it feels like much more than a standard 3-band equalizer.

Stereo: Enhanced Stereo Effect

The Chorus enhances the stereo effect and presence of a sound by mixing it  with delayed versions of itself. It's like your own personal choir!

Delay: Echoing Effect

While large echoing cavernous chambers seldom are the first pick for a good acoustic space, Delay effects have been ubiquitous in sound processing for a long time.

The kHs Delay can be run both free running and tempo synced with various stereo and feedback options. Most notable however is the duck feature, which optionally only lets the echoed sound through when there is no dry input signal. This allows for long and heavy delay while still avoiding clutter over the original sound. Clever!

Dynamics

Dynamics processing featuring upward and downward compression as well as expansion. Thresholds and ratio are controlled by clicking and dragging on the visualization in the upper part of the plugin interface. The visualization shows how input levels are mapped to output levels by the dynamics processing. The current input and output levels are marked in the visualizer by a moving disc.

Gain: Volume Control

Sound loud? Make softer. Sound quiet? Make louder.

Limiter: Volume Threshold

Whether you want to crank the last drops of gain out of your track or just  want to control a few loud peaks, a Limiter can be the weapon of choice. By looking a little bit into the future, a limiter can make sure your signal  never goes louder than you want it to without distorting or destroying  transients. Even with the knob turned to 11.

Stereo: Width and Panning

Width and panning.

Left speaker.                                      Right speaker.

          W             i             d             e

                             Narrow

Compressor: Even Out Total Volume

Someone somewhere once said that there are 931 compressor plugins in the world. Well, now there's 932!

Compressors help shape the dynamics of the sound both at the initial attack and  the sustain tail. Each compressor has their own flavor, and the kHs Compressor  tastes sweet.

Distortion: Versatile Distortion Effect

Ever since mankind invented music, there has been a desire to make it heavier. Distortion can take your sound from zero to sword wielding hero in seconds.

5 different distortion shapes are available to add a tinge of edge or rip things apart.  In stereo, if that's what you're into.

Filter: Common Filter Effects

Sometimes in life, sound comes with frequencies you don't like. So why not cut them out?

kHs Filter is a resonant filter with 7 modes, swiftly getting rid of frequencies you  don't like or enhancing frequencies you do. And it's doing it and doing it and doing it good

Phaser: Pulsating Effect

Beam me up, Scotty! No matter if you set the knob to stun or kill, Phaser can spice up your life with twirly frequency sweeps.Pretty much all the bad things with signal phase issues, but turned into an effect and labeled "cool".

Reverb: Spatial simulation

Reverbs, simulating the millions of tiny echoes that naturally bounce off  the walls in a room, have become an central part in glueing together sounds in a song. There are likely few tracks today that don't contain reverb in any form.

The kHs Reverb is a simple but powerful reverb, which helps you to quickly  tune in the character you want.