Toneworks have released Catalyst, a plugin for basslines, melodies, chord progressions and arpeggios sequencing. Catalyst is available at tye intro price of €49.00, increasing to €79.00 after the promotion.
Catalyst is the ultimate sequencing powerhouse — designed for those times when you are stuck in a rut and need to kickstart your creative flow.
- Create classical and modern synth patterns that always fit the key of your song.
- Host synth plugins within Catalyst and automate parameters with dedicated step sequencers.
- Discover a wealth of musical ideas that never would have surfaced in the piano roll of your DAW.
Catalyst will only ever play notes and chords in the key you choose. Experiment freely and use the built in randomization functions knowing that what you create will never sound out of place. You set the key in Catalyst by choosing a root note and a scale. Changing the root note will transpose your pattern up or down and changing the scale will alter the intervals between notes in the pattern. There is no need to know music theory when you use Catalyst. No matter what you do, the results are guaranteed to be musical.
Catalyst features a monophonic step sequencer that allows you to create patterns with up to 32 steps. Each step has individual pitch, velocity and gate time controls. The pitch slider only allows you to choose notes in the selected key. If you change the key at a later point, the notes in your sequencer pattern will automatically match the new root note and/or scale.
Individual steps can be tied together to make longer notes – or to create glides when the soft synth you use with Catalyst is set to legato mode. The five pattern slots that can be used to store different ideas and variations. You can transpose patterns or switch between them by sending MIDI to Catalyst from your DAW. Black notes select pattern 1-5 and white keys transpose the active pattern up or down.
The chords generated by the harmonizer are fed into the arpeggiator module, which in turn creates single note patterns from chords. Where most arpeggiators are based on predefined patterns, Catalyst allows you to design your own. A pattern can be up to 32 steps long, and each step features individual pitch, velocity and gate time controls – exactly step sequencer. The main difference is that the arpeggiator plays notes from the incoming chord instead of notes from the selected scale.
The arpeggiator will add notes above or below those in the incoming chord to allow for long sweeping arpeggios, and special editing functions make it easy to create rising or falling patterns of any length and combine them as desired.
There are many ways to use Catalyst, some more obvious than others. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Route your MIDI keyboard to a Catalyst track in your DAW and switch on the harmonizer and arpeggiator modules. Now play arpeggios with a single finger on your keyboard – or switch off the arpeggiator module to play chords instead.
- Create up to five different patterns in the step sequencer and jam away on the black keys on your MIDI keyboard to combine them into different melodies — or transpose the active pattern by playing the white keys instead.
- Try changing the scale of existing patterns. Most people tend to stick with major and minor scales but other scales are useful too and can produce unique results. For example, Dorian is great for House and Phrygian works really well for Techno!
- Take some time to build a small preset library of great basslines, melodies, chord progressions and arpeggios in your favorite genre. Once you have these elements in place, combining them into a finished song is so much easier than writing one from scratch.
- If you struggle with music theory, simply set up Catalyst on a number of tracks in your DAW and use these for the musical parts of your song. As long as all Catalyst instances have the same root note and scale settings, the parts are guaranteed to work together.
- Automate the Catalyst root note and scale parameters in your DAW to create mode changes and other unusual results.
- Record the MIDI output from Catalyst to a free track in your DAW and edit your patterns in the piano roll (if that’s your thing).
Catalyst is available to PC and Mac users (VST2, VST3 and AU).
For more information on Catalyst, click here:
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