> Step by step

2. Main features

1 Once installed, Bazille should load into your sequencer as any other plugin, no serial numbers required here though. Load it onto a MIDI channel (as shown here in Live) and load it up. We’ve detailed the main component modules over to the left. Let’s now look at some of the other great Bazille CM features.

2 We’ll start with the synth presets. Click on the Presets tab at the left side of the synth to open this window. Presets are shown by author or type, and should include a pack of Computer Music presets as given away with the synth six years ago. If not, we’ve included them in the Tutorials folder at FileSilo. Use the instructions, bottom right, to load them.

3 Now right (or Control)-click in the lefthand Folders pane for further options. You can also drag patches between folders, easily add more (see below), tag patches as favourites and much more. When you create your own patches, simply hit the Save button to store them in the User folder.

4 Bazille CM lets you create your own synth architecture with virtual patch cables to wire together various modules. Click on a grey output (outlined left above) and drag the cable that appears to any grey input (outlined right). To delete a cable just click the output and drag it away from it.

5 For hardware modular synths, the signals will either be audio or modulation but there’s no restrictions here. In fact you can even plug modules back into themselves, or use them to modulate their own controls. It might not make a sound but you can give it a try!

6

Many of the routing options can be changed by clicking each window for a dropdown menu to appear, so you can easily change what an output cable is affecting. Try doing that with hardware!

7

Controls on the Bazille CM UI are very much like hardware synth controls so you get two types: unipolar, which start from zero and go up, and bipolar, which start centrally and can be twisted left or right for negative or positive. Both types are shown here.

8

Drag with the mouse or use your mouse wheel to change any dial or slider on the UI, and hold Shift for an even finer adjustment. You can also use double-click to return a parameter to its default value and right-clicking a control locks it to the same value, even when you change presets.

9

The main screen gives you a sonic visualisation of the preset sound you are playing, and you can adjust how much you see of this waveform in both the vertical (Scale) and horizontal (Frequency) planes.

10

There are (very) useful Undo and Redo buttons (arrows) that you can fall back on, if you make mistakes or forget what you have just tweaked.

11

The orange dropdown menus we mentioned earlier are mostly used for modulation changes so you can, say, apply the LFO to various parameters all listed on one input, or take a signal from a different range of sources.

12

Press the cog icon over at the righthand side of the synth for some Global parameters. You can, for example, change the opacity of the cables which is great as there can be a lot of them getting in the way, so simply make them see-through!

13

Within this section, if you click on the MIDI connector (5 pin) with an ‘L’ next to it, Bazille goes into MIDI Learn mode whereby you select a parameter/dial, twist a control on your MIDI controller and that will be assigned to the Bazille dial. Easy!

14

Bazille is capable of a range of sounds by different synthesis methods. You can do basic FM synthesis by taking the output of one oscillator and feeding it into the other’s Phase Modulation input. Here we’ve done that with Osc 2 into 1. There’s more on this and other synthesis types in the tutorial PDF at File Silo. Now we’ll create a basic patch.