Bella

The Bella VST plugin was developed to be a simple additive synth that's optimized for bells sounds and non-sustained instruments. I find it easy to create all kinds of magical and dreamy atmospheres with it. Bella comes with 16 presets to get you started, but it's fairly easy to modify the presets and get something new.

PlugIn parameters:

Bell Design: Bells Type - "Pure" is a sinusoid bell, very clean and pure in sound. "Harmonic" is a triangular bell, so it has a richer - but somewhat buzzier - sound.

Bells Size - you can choose any one of six sizes. the higher the slider, the larger the bell.

Resonance - is the release rate of the sound. High values create very resonant bells, while low values create more muffled bells.

Metal - adds a non-harmonic, metalic character to the sound. it may cause heavy detuning but hey - that's what makes it "belly"... Anyhow you can use the master tune slider in the master section to fix any detuning problem.

Detune - a massive detune option. Play with the slider to find a spot that's "belly" in sound but still doesn't sound completely out of tune.

Delay: Send - sends the sound to the delay effect.

Time - the delay time.

Feedback - the ammount of feedback.

F/B Contour - This is a band-pass filter patched into the feedback loop. You can control two parameters of the filter:

Cutoff - the cutoff frequency of the filter.

Band Width - the width of the band pass filter. Lower values make a narrow band feedback filtering, while higher values create a wide band feedback filtering.

Master: Tune - since Bella has a couple of detuning parameters ("Metal" and "Detune"), use this slider to re-tune your sound. It goes from -0.4166 (pure fourth down) to +0.4166 (pure fourth up). Use your ear or a tuner to set this parameter. Useful tune values: 0.0833 - semi tone, 0.1666 - tone, 0.25 - minor third, 0.3333 - major third.

Vel. Sense - Velocity sensitivity. When off (full to the left) Bella will not respond to keyboard velocity.

Stereo - When off (LED is off) Bella will produce a mono sound. the higher the slider - the wider stereo image will be created. Note that very high stereo values might alter the sound, especially for "harmonic" bell types.

Push - this is a DiVerSe PusHer circuit. it is a saturator that will give more volume and depth to your sound - but might slightly reduce high frequencies, so use it wisely.

Volume - the master volume of the Bella synth.