How to use "Harmor" for chiptuning

[Doc]

So a lot of people use famitracker 8-bit composition, which is really cool and I'm totally down with that
But some people have trouble wrapping their heads around it? Not that it's hard creating the tones but to make it sound audible can be a bit frightening to newcomers. this is where the brilliance of the Harmor VST from Image-Line comes in.

If you have FL studio, regardless of version (as long as it's somewhat recent) then you should already be set to go. If you can't find it or don't have it, you can either buy it from their website or find a free standalone .dll online ( I have one if needed :V )

SO basically harmor's really cool and user-friendly

This is basically the layout.

Spoiler

At first, it can be a bit scary. This is when you don't take into consideration that 90% of the modulation and automation tools in this VST aren't used all that much. All we really need to focus on is the top left, and the bottom half of the VST.

First, you should learn to play around with the waves. To switch from square/saw, use the little "mix" dial in-between the waveforms. You can have either-or, or a mix of the both. Put it at where you like, but for this short tutorial I'm just going to be using the default square wave (dial turned all the way to the right).

Next up are modulation envelopes. These are the coolest part of making the 8-bit sounds. Check it out.



The dropdown on the left is the the main envelopes, and you don't really need to use the other on the right, that's just for mapping to keyboard and other complicated stuff. What you should be focusing on is the knobs in the lower left corner of the modulation screen, that go by "Att", "Dec", "Sus", and 'Rel".

In order, these mean "Attack", "Duration", "Sustain", and "release". It's pretty straight forward, but honestly I almost never use these. you can click on the interactive surface to pinpoint where you want your x/y axis of the modulation dots to go, so don't even worry about it.

Another thing to take note of is the "Check" next to the knobs.



just incase you don't hear anything changing. the envelope check must be checked in order for it to be enabled! if it's not, you won't hear the changes you made.

My favorite envelope in the dropdown is the Volume tab (ofc) and the "Pitch Vibrato Depth", a bit lower on the same column. Let me tell you about the true power of Vibrato depth.

Bygone are the days of having to mark your pitch vibrato for every note, as it's now a full envelope and will be applied to each notes start and finish pattern!

You can play around with it and try and figure it out, but I'll just give you the basics. Pretty much the closer the highest modulation dot is to the beginning of the modulation screen, the earlier the pitch vibrato's going to come into play. With these you can get some awesome/spooky sounds from your chips.

(before you start modulating the envelope, take into consideration that the highest the modulation dot will go is in coordination with your vibrato depth knob, which can be found here)



That's pretty much it, tried to keep it short and sweet. Play around with this VST, you can get some really cool sounds out of it (and not only chiptune ones!)

[Sorav]

Nice. I was wondering how to achieve that sound in FL Studio. Maybe I'll combine the sounds; 8bit sounds mixed with modern sounds, or something. Gonna try this later.

[Omegajak]

Delicious 8-32 bit sound. FINALLY.