Blazar Core

Blend four effects with one orb

Every channel has a Morph field between insert 4 and insert 5. Load up to four effects into its slots and drag the orb across the pad. Two effects sit on a line, three on a triangle, four on a square.

The shares always add up to 100%, so the level holds while you move. All four effects keep running, and a reverb tail never cuts off halfway.

Press Write and move the orb while the music plays. Blazar Core records the path and plays the movement back.

Load one plugin into all four slots with different settings, and the orb morphs between its presets.

Recorded MIDI that sits where you meant it

Blazar Core places recorded MIDI where you heard it, after taking off your interface’s latency. What is left is your own playing: a little ahead of the click or behind it, drifting as you go, slowly over a long take and quickly within a phrase.

Align reads that lean the way a musician would. Note by note, it works out which line of the grid each note was meant for, quarters, eighths, sixteenths or triplets, and puts it there. Unlike quantize, a note that drifted closer to the wrong line still lands on the right one. Chords land flat, and a grace note or a flam keeps its feel.

Switch on Auto and every take goes onto the click by itself when recording stops, as its own undo step. Ctrl+Z gives you the playing as it was.

Align sits beside Quantize and Humanize in the piano roll, and in the Q menu.

Play each key switch once, then drag it where you need it

Orchestral libraries switch articulations with key switches, keys outside the playing range. Click Learn key switches in the instrument’s window and play each key switch once on your keyboard. Every key becomes a button, named by what the library’s window shows for it: Legato, Spiccato, Tremolo, Pizzicato.

A key that plays a note is left out. Blazar Core keeps the key switches with that program, so they are there the next time you load it.

In the piano roll, the buttons sit above the notes. Drag one onto the articulation lane below the notes, and the notes from there on play with that articulation until the next change. Blazar Core sends the key switches during playback.

With notes selected, a click on a button gives them that articulation. Right-click a button to rename it.

Zoom into a track and its channel

Press Z and the selected track fills most of the arrangement. At the same moment the mixer opens that channel’s strip beside it: filters, EQ, gate, compressor and tape, each with its display and knobs.

The EQ draws the channel’s spectrum under its curve while the music plays.

Select another track and the zoom follows. Press Z again and everything folds back.

Every channel has the strip built in, after its inserts and before its fader, like a console. Each module stays off until you switch it on.

Make room for the lead

Eclipse goes on a bed, such as a string pad or a choir, and follows the lead you pick from its list. Whenever the lead plays, Eclipse cuts the exact notes it holds, and their harmonics, out of the bed. The cuts last only while those notes sound.

The horn line stays clear over thick strings, and the strings keep everything else.

Eclipse reads the lead’s notes straight from Blazar Core. There is no sidechain to route and nothing guessed from the audio.

Depth, Width and Harmonics set how deep and how wide the cuts go. Release sets how long the room stays after a note.

A delay that plays the rhythm you draw

Quasar is a delay whose echoes follow a rhythm you build, instead of one note value. Click the grid and an echo appears on the nearest step, as loud as your click is high. Drag it to move it or change its level, and drag the dot beneath it to place it in the stereo field.

The rhythm runs over one or two bars at the song’s tempo and plays again, quieter by Feedback. Turn up Uncertainty and the echoes drift off their places and now and then skip a pass, so no two loops are quite alike.

Patterns has starting points, from dotted eighths and tresillo to Bo Diddley and a two-bar spiral, and Random rolls a new rhythm.

Low cut and High cut shape the echoes, and each loop comes back a little darker.

Playback that rides out CPU spikes

While the song plays, Slipstream renders the tracks that are only playing back a little ahead of the audio device, on CPU threads of their own. When a plugin spikes, that time ahead absorbs the spike, instead of the spike reaching your speakers as a dropout.

Tracks you play, record or monitor, and any track whose plugin window is open, stay in real time, so a knob you turn is heard at once. Faders, pan, mute, solo, sends and volume automation stay live on every track.

How far ahead adapts by itself, deeper after a close call and back again when things are calm.

Slipstream is on by default. The audio load meter in the status line shows how far ahead it is.

Dark or Daylight, at the click of a key

The sun key at the bottom right switches the whole of Blazar Core to Daylight, warm paper and ink, at once. The moon key switches back to Dark.

In Daylight, track colours, timecode and hit points take deeper shades so they still read on the light ground. Blazar Core keeps your choice for the next launch.