WEDGE FORCE Matcha Software Synthesizer User Manual

WEDGE FORCE Matcha Software Synthesizer

INTRODUCTION

Thank you!
Welcome to the world of synthetic guitars!
We would like to thank you for purchasing one of our fine musical instruments!

About Us

• We are an innovative company with a mission to deliver authentic software guitar sound synthesis.
• We enable musicians to create mouse click perfect guitar parts with professional sound quality.
• Our software musical instruments are equally well suited for live on-stage performances as well as studio recordings.

REQUIREMENTS

Supported Formats

• Supports Mac OSX and PC Windows OS
• Supports 64bit Platforms
• Supports AAX, VST3, VST2 and AU plugin formats
• Supports Pro Tools, Cubase, Garage Band, Sonar, Logic Pro and other DAW container applications

Hardware

• Minimum
  CPU: 2.5 GHz RAM: 4 GB
  HDD: 5 GB

• Recommended
  CPU: 3.0 GHz RAM: 16 GB HDD: 5 GB

FEATURES

1. Scream Harmonics
   Pinch harmonics can be blended into the main tone by using the MOD wheel controller on your keyboard. Making your scream tone authentic and in-tune!

2. Neck Play Position
   Identical notes are available on multiple different frets on a guitar neck and they all sound different. This is why we provide you with the option to choose the proper neck mapping for your sound preferences.

3. Guitar Riffs
   “Earl Gray” synth is designed for playing guitar riffs and solos. It features customizable pitch bending, solo/multi polyphony and note attack settings.

4. Palm Muting
   Palm muting is a popular technique among guitarists to achieve the cool “Dzj Dzj” sound. You can achieve it by pressing the sustain pedal.  The “punch mute” option simulates the initial string punching sound if you press the sustain pedal while a note is already sounding.

How are we different?
At the heart of our massive and authentic tone is our proprietary “Synthetic Force Engine”. Sampled sounds on their own do not sound like the real guitar instrument. Harmonic resonances are different for each different combination of notes. This is why our “Synthetic Force Engine” combines pre- sampled waveforms with real-time synthesized sounds.

No Built in Effects
Matcha comes without any effects on board. We focused our efforts on synthesizing the perfect DI guitar sound ready to be pumped into any existing 3rd party guitar effects gear.  To play the “Matcha” synth you’re going to need lots of third party effects (tube amp, delay, chorus, distortion, flanger, etc.) because the clean DI sound is dull. You can start with software guitar effects like TH3 and Guitar Rig.  If you need professional sound we recommend the Kepmer or Axe FX.  We recommend digital guitar effects because reamping an analog signal reduces the sound quality.

Fully Customizable

• Adjustable Neck vs Bridge pickup mix percentage
• Customizable velocity mapping of your keyboard
• Customizable behavior of your sustain pedal
• Play extrapolated notes outside the guitar neck
• Customizable pitch bender for BEND or SLIDE the notes over semitone intervals

Under the Hood

• Studio Sampled Waveforms 96 KHz, 24bit, Uncompressed
  It took us an insane amount of crafting to sample the world’s most iconic custom-made guitars (the exact customizations are our trade secret) with the best possible (to date) sound equipment.

• Real-Time Synthesized Sounds Internal 64bit double precision
  We simulate the string resonance in real-time to synthesize the right harmonics and blend them into the main studio sampled tone.  This is our unique way to preserve the authentic guitar timbre.

Deployment

Download
You can find a download link to the product installation in your purchase email. It is different for MAC and PC.

Installation

• Make sure your OS account has administrative privileges before you launch the installation.
• During installation you can choose to install all different plugin formats or exclude the ones not relevant to your environment.
  • HINT : For best performance we recommend installing on a SSD drive. Installing “Matcha” on a slower HDD is ok and will not impact the sound quality – only the initial plugin loading times.

Activation
You need to activate your product copy after the installation. You will be prompted to enter:

• The email you used to purchase the product
• The PRODUCT-KEY you received by email

PRODUCT-KEYs are personal with a limited number of activations.

Telemetry
To improve our product, we might collect telemetry data. It includes product settings, environment configuration and crash reports. We do not collect any personal data.

Updates
“Matcha” will prompt you at startup to download and install new updates when they are released.

SETTINGS

Volume Controls

1. The master volume works like the guitar’s volume knob.
2. You can use the GAIN slider to adjust the output level or you could connect an external volume pedal.

Mute
You can mute the guitar sound with the sustain pedal. It takes time to master this technique, similarly to the palm muting on a real guitar instrument.

Sustain Pedal
The behavior of the sustain pedal can be changed.

• The HOLD option makes the sustain pedal hold all pressed notes until you release it (like on a piano).
• The HOLD behavior is not much useful for guitar parts so we introduced the MUTE option where the notes will sound muted while the sustain pedal is pressed.
• The PUNCH MUTE option works like MUTE but if you press the sustain pedal while a note is playing it will silent the note with a muted sound (like on a guitar). The PUNCH MUTE is our favorite behavior.
• HINT : Try the PUNCH MUTE option with distortion effects.
• Normally, the sustain pedal should be activated when pressed and deactivated when released. Some pedals might be reversed when used with keyboards from different manufacturers.
• If you bump into this inconvenience you can invert the sustain pedal behavior by clicking on this icon:

Picking Behaviour

• Auto AI: Predict the correct picking direction (up or down) based on the tempo of playing, neck position and velocity of the previously played notes.
• Down/Up: Always down/up picking.
• Alternate : Start with down and then keep alternating – up, down, up, etc.

Status Badges
These badges show the current settings you are using. The default badge color is black. They turn red when you run in sub-optimal settings like sample rates below 96 kHz or in a 32bit DAW container, etc.

Harmonics
A major difference between guitars and keyboards is that guitarists have direct access to their strings and are able to play additional (also called artificial or pinch) harmonics into their main guitar tone. This technique is widely used by guitarists to achieve “screaming” sounds in solos and riffs.
Our “Synthetic Force Engine” is capable of synthesizing artificial harmonic sounds so you can blend them into the main guitar tone with the MOD WHEEL controller of your keyboard.

MOD Wheel
You can blend artificial (pinch) harmonics into the main guitar tone by using the MOD WHEEL controller on your keyboard. The upper slider controls (in %) the amount of harmonic tone when MOD WHEEL controller is all the way up. This ensures that you won’t go beyond this limit while playing live. You can experiment with settings from 50% to 80%. The lower slider controls (in %) the amount of harmonic tone when MOD WHEEL controller is all the way down. You can experiment with percentages from 0% to 30% to always blend a smaller amount of harmonics to all notes. While playing live you can adjust the harmonic mix (with the MOD WHEEL controller) in the range bound by the two sliders.

Pitch Bend

• This slider adjusts the PITCH BEND interval in semitones.
• The same interval works for bending both up and down.
• When bending down the interval is always 12 semitones.

Neck Position

1. The neck of the guitar is richer than the piano keyboard in a way that a single note is available on multiple different frets and each of them has unique sound because of the different string lengths and gauges.
2. The neck mapping position sliders adjusts the starting guitar fret from which the keyboard will be mapped.
3. The current mapping is marked by the yellow dots on the guitar neck.
4. There are separate sliders for each of the strings (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
5. You can experiment with lower frets and open strings for cleaner ringing tones, while the upper frets will give you warmer and tighter sounds.

Note Attack

1. You can adjust the ATTACK of your notes.
2. Brighter attacks always use samples with higher articulation which sounds great when all notes are with similar velocities.
3. Dynamic attacks use mellow samples when you play at low velocity and bright samples when you play harder.

Note Detune
Guitar players can hardly play in perfect tune all their notes. This leads to slight detune into their guitar parts which sounds realistic. The DETUNE setting helps keyboardists to do the same.

Polyphony

• You can adjust your POLYPHONY from this setting.

• You need this to play clean solos where only one note is audible at a time.
  HINT : Try this on solo parts with high distortion effects.

• Another reason would be to limit the CPU load by ensuring that no more than a certain number of notes will be playing at the same time.

Velocity Mapping
These controls allow you to adjust the velocity mappings depending on your playing style. High flat mappings are good for distortion guitar parts while increased dynamic ranges are suitable for clean guitar parts.  The dynamic ranges of different keyboard models vary so you should adjust the velocity mapping to match your keyboard.

Velocity Presets
Use the default velocity presets to quickly select a mapping that matches your playing style.  We encourage you to start from a preset and then adjust the individual velocity map sliders and gain level (if needed).

Presets

• We provide you with default presets. You can explore them to hear how the sound changes.
• Each different preset comes with it unique demo audit song.
• Once you get familiar with the settings you can start customizing them to find your unique sound.

Keyboard

• The on-screen keyboard contains the notes that are present on the guitar neck.
• The Synthetic Force Engine is capable of synthesizing notes two octaves below and above the guitar neck range but they should be used carefully because they do not correspond to guitar frets and sound unnatural in guitar parts.
• Most guitar effects are designed to sound well only within the guitar range.

PB and MOD Indicators

These indicators show the current position of PITCH BEND and MOD WHEEL controllers.

Last Notes

• Guitarists often hold a note on one string while bending a note on a different string.
• By default, both PITCH BEND and MOD WHEEL controllers affect all currently pressed notes. To achieve the same technique, you need to adjust the “LAST NOTES” settings for either PITCH BEND or MOD WHEEL.
  • For example, if you set the LAST NOTES for PITCH BEND to “1” then only the last played note will be bent, leaving all other notes playing in the background without bending them. If you set it to “2” the last two notes will be bent.
• There are separate LAST NOTE knobs for PITCH BAND and MOD WHEEL to adjust them according to your playing style.

Fine Tune
Our samples are in perfect tune to 440 Hz but sometimes you may need to detune your guitar to match another instrument or to match a different tuner. This vertical slider allows you to fine tune your “MATCHA” synthetic guitar.

MIDI Control Channels

• You can map all settings described so far to the hardware knobs on your MIDI keyboard.
• Different keyboards use different MIDI CC values. You can customize yours from here:
• HINT : The easiest way to find out the MIDI CC values of your keyboard is by using the LEARN button.

MATCHA SYNTH

support@wedgeforce.com

www.wedgeforce.com

ADDRESS: 546 5TH AVENUE NEW YORK, NY 10036, USA

WEDGE FORCE INC © 2020

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