These are found across the top of the Sculpture interface, unless otherwise specified.
Glide Time field: Set the time required to slide from the pitch of one played note to another. The Glide parameter behavior depends on the keyboard mode you choose.
If you set the keyboard mode to Poly or Mono and set Glide to a value other than 0, portamento is active.
If you choose Legato and set Glide to a value other than 0, you need to play legato (press a new key while holding the old one) to activate portamento. If you don’t play in a legato style, portamento won’t work. This behavior is also known as fingered portamento.
Tune field: Fine-tune the entire instrument, in cents. A cent is 1/100th of a semitone.
Warmth field: Slightly detune each voice to warm or thicken the sound. This parameter emulates the random fluctuations caused by the components and circuitry of analog synthesizers.
Transpose field: Tune the entire instrument by octaves. Given the ability of component modeling to radically alter pitch with certain settings, coarse tuning is limited to octave increments.
Voices field: Specify the number of voices that can be played at any one time. Sixteen voices is the maximum polyphony of Sculpture.
Keyboard Mode buttons: Choose polyphonic, monophonic, and legato behaviors. A polyphonic instrument, such as an organ or piano, allows several notes to be played simultaneously. Many older analog synthesizers are monophonic, which means that only one note can be played at a time, much like a brass or reed instrument. This shouldn’t be viewed as a disadvantage in any way, because it allows playing styles that are not possible with polyphonic instruments.
In Mono mode, staccato playing retriggers the envelope generators every time a new note is played. If you play in a legato style (play a new key while holding another), the envelope generators are triggered only for the first note you play legato. They then continue their curve until you release the last legato played key. Mono mode is also known as multi trigger mode.
Legato mode is also monophonic, but with one difference: the envelope generators are retriggered only if you play staccato—releasing each key before playing a new key. If you play in a legato style, envelopes are not retriggered. Legato mode is also known as single trigger mode.
Note: All modes retrigger a potentially sounding voice with the same pitch, instead of allocating a new one. Therefore, multiple triggering of a given note results in slight timbral variations, depending on the current state of the model at note-on time. If the string is still vibrating for a specific note, retriggering that same note interacts with the ongoing vibration, or current state of the string. A true retrigger of the vibrating string happens only if both Attack sliders of the amplitude envelope are set to 0. If either slider is set to any other value, a new voice is allocated with each retriggered note. See Sculpture amplitude envelope parameters.
Bender Range Up/Down fields: Set the upward/downward pitch bend range.
Separate settings are available for upward and downward pitch bends—using your MIDI keyboard pitch bend controller.
When Bender Range Down is set to Linked, the Bender Range Up value is used for both (up and down) directions.
Note: Bending the string, just like the string on a real guitar, alters the shape of the modeled string, rather than acting as a simple pitch bend.