The illustrated tour
Two voices, with a relationship.
The kick and bass each have a sound and a rhythm of their own. What makes KerBy useful is being able to work on the way they meet: when the bass starts, how it moves between notes, and how much room it leaves around the kick.
A note can become a rhythm.
Every MIDI note triggers both kick and bass. In Live mode, hold a note or play legato and the Rate knobs do the repeating: a quarter-note kick over a sixteenth-note bass gives four bass pulses to every kick. Turn Rate for a stutter, then send it home to the original pulse.
When the two rates don’t divide evenly, say a dotted bass under a straight kick, the bass starts its figure again at every kick. Switch off Restart on Kick and it runs on across the kick instead, for a polyrhythm that turns over against the bar.
In Draw mode, each note you write in your DAW is one hit of kick and bass together. The sound-shaping tools are the same; your notes decide when they play. Give each note enough length for the bass to come back in after the kick.
Go anywhere. Come home on the beat.
Rate is there to be played, and the home button is what makes that safe. Push a stutter as far as it goes or drag the tempo around, then one press brings both Rate knobs home and both bend wheels back to centre, on the beat.
A knob’s home is the value the patch loaded with, until you choose Set as home. A small tick on the knob’s track always shows where it is.
The macros, Glitch and Reverse come back too, and any sound knob can join them: close a filter down through a build and it opens again on the drop.
Put it on a button you can hit without looking: Return Home is a plugin parameter, so your DAW’s MIDI mapping can give it a button on your controller.
The shape is part of the sound.
The Wave tab draws one cycle of the oscillator. A rounded shape and a sharp-edged one give you different starting sounds before you touch an effect.
The other curves describe change over time: how a hit fades, how its pitch falls, how the filter opens, or how the bass returns after a kick.
Start with a shape preset and move a few points, or paint steps onto the grid with the drawing tool. The next pulse cuts a long shape short, so listen to Rate and Length together.
Bring a recording into the pattern.
Drop a sample onto the Wave tab and it becomes that voice’s source. The same rhythm now retriggers the recording, and played notes change its pitch.
For a sampled attack over a synthesised kick, use the separate Click tab. The kick keeps its own waveform, and the sample gets its own level, envelope, high-pass filter and playback pitch.
It works the other way too. Drag either scope and the bar it shows drops into your DAW, or back onto a Wave tab, as a WAV. Zoomed in, you get the quarter bar on screen.
Leave holes. Change a few notes.
The bass step row decides which parts of the bar are allowed to sound. Switch a box off to leave a gap; drag it vertically to change the pitch there.
It works with the bass’s Rate, so changing the rate changes which parts of the pattern you hear.
Drag a step’s right edge to stretch it into a longer note. The − and + at the row’s ends change how long the pattern runs, up to two bars; give it an odd length and the bassline turns over against the bar instead of with it.
The space is something you can shape.
The ducking curve is the bass’s volume after a kick. Low at the start leaves room for the hit, and the rise brings the bass back in. A slow rise pumps; a quick one keeps the bass tight to the kick.
The kick’s optional reverb follows that curve too. Try it with the bass muted for a low techno rumble that rises between kicks.
Take the pattern somewhere else.
Pitch bend changes the notes; tempo bend stretches or compresses KerBy’s rhythm against the DAW. Reverse plays the finished sound backwards, ducking and reverb included.
Glitch, on each voice’s More tab, breaks the pulse up with rolls and dropouts in time with the beat. A little gives the odd stutter; turned right up, the rolls change speed several times a bar. When the kick rolls, the bass ducks under each repeat.
There is more sound shaping in the More tabs: FM, Tone, Noise and Crush on both voices, with resonance and glide on the bass. The signal-flow map shows where these act.
Let one move drive many.
On the Matrix page, drag a macro’s name onto a knob and the macro turns it. Drop it on a few more, on either voice, and one move reshapes the kick and bass together.
LFOs move things on their own, in time with the track. Draw an LFO’s curve, or turn its Shape to morph through sines, triangles, ramps and squares. A voice’s waveform can morph the same way: route an LFO to Wave Shape and the oscillator itself starts to move.