How to Use the Jamstik MIDI Guitar with Kilohearts' Phase Plant

A BRIEF INTRO TO PHASE PLANT 

Since its initial release in late 2019, Kilohearts' Phase Plant has proven itself to be an incredibly powerful and versatile soft synth. Not only does it come with a slew of interesting and usable presets (and additional sound packs), but it’s also one of the few synths we’ve tried that makes complicated ideas seem easy and intuitive.

Phase Plant has always had the reputation of being a ‘sound designers synth’, but the good folks at Kilohearts took this even further with some recent updates. Most notably (to us at least), is the addition of MPE support. One of the beautiful things about Phase Plant is that it's MPE compatible right out of the box. So don’t be afraid to just plug your guitar in and see what happens—I can already tell you, it’s going to be awesome. That being said, with a couple of settings tweaks to your Jamstik, you can form a very deep and interactive connection between the two.

Here’s one of the ways we’ve been utilizing Phase Plant’s new MPE features to generate unique and dynamic sounds with the Jamstik.

RECOMMENDED MPE SETTINGS FOR YOUR JAMSTIK

Inside the ‘Device Settings’ tab, double-check that you’re in MPE mode and then change the ‘string envelope mapping’ to ‘channel pressure’. More on this later.

INSIDE PHASE PLANT

Now, inside Phase Plant, the bottom portion of the plugin should display the ‘modulators’ section. Select an empty box to load a new ‘modulator’. Then, under ‘MIDI’, select ‘Pressure’.

Now we have access to the physical decay of the guitar strings and we can assign this envelope to control, and essentially, whatever we’d like. For demonstrative purposes, I’ve loaded a basic oscillator and a filter, but you could add this modulation to any preset you’d like.

So now that it’s set up, what can we really do with this? One instance where this could be useful would be to assign this modulator to the cutoff of a filter so the filter’s behavior is determined by how hard or soft you pluck, and also the duration that you decide to let the string sustain. And that’s just one simple example, you could assign this to the wet value of an effect, the gain of an oscillator, etc.

Enjoy, and make sure to tag us in your Jamstik and Kilohearts creations!