In Progress

The state of this synthesizer is beta. This does not mean it will crash or cause any trouble, but rather that the sound might change slightly (hopefully for the better) during development. It also means that I'm listening to your ideas and suggestions. Please do try it out. If you experience bugs or have some awesome ideas, let the world (and me) know what you think on the kvraudio.com's forum

Super Sound

Thanks to the "super"-nature of its oscillators, Helix is capable of huge and wide unison pads and leads. Great care has been taken to ensure no aliasing in the oscillators, so the sound is free from many artifacts traditionally associated with software synthesizers. This becomes very clear when playing high notes.

Modulation Mayhem

Forty two modulation slots. Each with one source, two destinations and a scale-source. For instance: One LFO can modulate the pitch of two oscillators, and the amount can be scaled by the modulation wheel. This would take up one slot.

Stereo by Design

All parts of Helix are stereo in - stereo out. Oscillators, filters, shapers and effects. This helps keeping the signal huge.

Distortion Delight

Three stages of distortion can turn any sound into a nightmare of screaming machinery

Road Tested

Helix is implemented as a VST plugin. This provides the highest degree of flexibility, since this plug-in format is supported by all leading DAWs. For DAWs without VST support there are wrappers available.

Known to work in the following hosts: Cubase LE, Cubase SX, Minihost, EnergyXT , Sonar, VstHost, Orion, Live, FL Studio, Cantabile

Supports windows and Mac OS X(intel), but a (slightly dated) linux port is available.

To Do

As Helix has been beta for quite a while now musicians has given a lot of valuable feedback. The below is a semi-ordered list of things I would like to improve/fix.

• Latching Arp
• Tag-based preset browser
• Improve the Analog oscillator to support tri-saw
• Improve the Analog oscillator to support synced-saw
• Pink and brown noise
• Mod-dest Saturator Drive and Mix
• Mod-dest Effects wet/dry amounts
• Mod-dest SEQ Period
• Properly free-running SEQ and LFO

Screenshot

Download

Latest Version for MacOSX and Win32

• 2008-04-13 Mac OSX
  2008-04-13 Win32
  Arpeggiator. Plucked String Model Oscillator. Noise Oscillator supports unstable. LFO-Period as Mod dst. Pop-up menus indicate current selection. Reverb sounds less metallic .

Sound Banks

More sounds for Helix, check out these sound banks from some talented sound designers:

• djtBMX_-_Helix_Noob A big collection of patches of various styles from Malice X (website)
• Adam_Alonso_-_Helix_Soundset 64 patches. Mostly Trance and some Electro, Euro, Techno and House, from Adam Alonso (website)

Archived Downloads

To download an old release, please follow the link to the archives.
Helix Archive