A Rhino preset can be made of up to 6 oscillators. The parameters for these oscillators are accessed through the oscillator pages, which are selected using the top window tabs. These parameters are described below.

It is possible to copy all the parameters of an oscillator into another one, using drag/drop on top level tabs.

Oscillator waveform

The waveform window, shown to the right, displays the shape of the selected oscillator waveform. Left-clicking in the oscillator name brings up a menu to select the current oscillator shape.

When the cursor is inside the waveform window, left and right arrows will appear at the bottom left of the window. Click on them to move to the next or previous waveform.

There are many, many different waveform shapes available in Rhino. All the available shapes have been carefully processed to minimize the amount of audible aliasing. They are sorted in logical groups, for instance:

• Attacks: short sampled attacks of various sounds, including vocals effects.
• Brass: trumpets, trombones, …
• Effects: special effects.
• Loops: various animated patters and loops.
• Nature: samples from nature noises.
• Noise: various flavours of noise (white, pink, brown, ….)
• Percussions: metallic percussion sounds.
• Single-Cycle: computer-generated single-cycle waveforms.
• Synthesized: various sounds generated with other software synthesizers.
• User-Defined: User1 to User6 waveforms, defined using the built-in additive editor

Some third-party presets come with additional waveforms packs. A waveform pack is a compressed file with a .vfs extension. To install a new waveform pack, simply place the associated .vfs file into the waves directory (in Rhino install folder).

The tab at the top of the oscillator page has a little green light, which is turned on whenever the oscillator is active. To turn off an oscillator, you can either:

• Set its waveform to OFF.
• or left-click in the waveform window to “mute” it.
• or left-click on the oscillator little green light (on the associated tab).

The more oscillators are used by a preset, the higher the CPU usage will be. It is thus recommended to turn off oscillators which are not used by a preset. You can (and should) safely turn off oscillators which are not used, either as an audio output, or as a FM input for another oscillator.

External waveforms

So far we’ve seen 2 different types of waveforms:

• Internal waveforms, which are multisamples stored in .vfs files.
• User-Defined waveforms, whose shape is defined using the additive generator.

There is a third type of waveform available in Rhino: external waveforms, which can be used to turn Rhino into a sampler ! Rhino can also import your own multisampled wav files, using either:

• Rhino own text file format
• or the industry-standard sfz format

Accepted wav files are Mono/Stereo, 8/16/24 bits files. In the case of stereo files, they will be converted to mono by averaging the left/right channels. This is because Rhino oscillators are monophonic.

To import your own waveforms, you will be putting files inside Rhino installation directory. Remember, For PC users, this directory is located in the folder you specified during Rhino installation. For MAC users, it is in ~/Library/Application Support/BigTick/Rhino

Regardless of the format (sfz or txt), importing a multisample into Rhino requires three steps:

• Define a hierarchy of folders inside the waves/External folder (in your Rhino installation directory). This hierarchy defines how the multisample will be accessed in the Rhino waveform menus and submenus.
• Place the multisample definition (sfz or txt) file into this newly created folder.
• Place the associated wav files according to their definition in the multisample definition file. If the definition starts with a ‘/’ or ‘\’ character, this is assumed to be an absolute path. Otherwise Rhino will look for the wav file in a relative path, starting from the waves/Samples folder in the installation directory.

Rhino multisamples file format

As an example to describe the file format, here’s the contents of the “real strings” multisample, which is included in the Rhino 2 demo:

Acoustic\Real Strings
0-A5|RealString1C5.wav|C5|0|14350
A#5-A6|RealString1C6.wav|C6|0|35511
A#6-127|RealString1C7.wav|C7|0|14551

The first line defines the name of the multisample. The remaining lines define, for each wav file:

• The note range for the sample
• The name of the wav file to use for the sample
• The base pitch of the sample (expressed either as a note number, or as an absolute frequency in Hertz; e.g 440.0)
• The amount of detuning (-50 to +50) for the sample
• The loop start point, expressed in samples. When playing a sample, Rhino will loop between this point, and the end of the sample. If this last value is omitted, Rhino will try to find the sample loop point from the ‘SMPL’ chunk stored into the wav file.

In our example above, 3 different wav files were mapped across the keyboard.

The .wav and .txt files can be packed into a redistributable .vfs file using a simple tool, which is available upon request to sound designers.

Oscillator Pitch

The Pitch. Coarse slider controls the detuning, in semitones, of the oscillator (default value is 0)
The Pitch. Fine slider controls fine tuning, in cents.
The Lfo button turns the oscillator into a low-frequency oscillator. This is a 3 state buttons, with the following meanings:

• Grey: normal mode (no LFO).
• Yellow: Oscillator frequency is divided by 100.
• Green: Oscillator frequency is divided by 10000.

Right-clicking in any of these sliders displays the pop-up window shown to the right. This window can be used to select the oscillator pitch mode:

• If x-Base is selected, the oscillator pitch is determined by a multiple of the default base frequency for the current note. This is very useful if you intend to use the oscillator as a FM modulation source.
• If Locked is selected, the oscillator pitch is “locked” to the displayed value (in Hertz). In this case the Lfo button described above is ignored.

The Pitch Modulation slider controls the range of the pitch envelope (see 6.4.5) for this oscillator.
The oscillator pitch can be slightly randomized with every note. The amount of randomness is controlled by the Pitch Random. slider.
The Phase Modulation slider sets the amount of modulation applied by the phase envelope for the oscillator. When set to its maximum value, the phase will be randomized with every note.
The Glide Time slider controls the time of the portamento effect for the current oscillator.

Oscillator Envelopes

Rhino envelopes are extremely powerful, and play a major role in Rhino preset design. They go way beyond the classical ADSR, and are capable of LFO effects or rhythmic patterns. Each oscillator has several envelopes, the one currently displayed is selected by left-clicking on the text at the top of the envelope curve.

Editing an envelope

The following applies to all envelopes:

• Right-click in the envelope background to bring up a menu allowing to add more envelope points, load and save envelopes, copy them across oscillators, stretch them, or fit them to the current display.
• If “autofit” is enabled (with the right-click menu) the display scale is continuously adjusted so that the entire envelope is visible in the window.
• If “lock points” is enabled (again, with the right-click menu), moving an envelope point will have no effects on its neighbors. If disabled, the neighbors are moved along.
• Use the left scrollbar to control the global envelope level.
• Left-click in the envelope background and drag horizontally to scroll.
• Left-click in the envelope background and drag vertically to zoom in and out.
• Drag square points to define the envelope shape, and circles to define the envelope segments curvature. Press the Shift key while dragging to fine tune the value.
• Control-Click on a square point to bring it to its default value (0 for level envelopes, 50 for pitch envelopes)
• Control-Click on a curvature control circle to set it to the default (50 = straight line) value.
• Right-click on a square point to delete it.
• The light area of the envelope is the sustain zone. The envelope will loop on this zone while the note is held. If the note off occurs before the sustain zone has been reached, then the envelope will jump to the segment immediately after the sustain zone. The sustain zone is edited by dragging the upward triangles at the bottom of the envelope. If both triangles are on the same point, the envelope has no sustain and will play till its end, regardless of the time at which the note off occurs.
  In the picture above, the sound will rise sharply to the maximum value, reach that point in 40ms, then decay sharply first, then linearly. At the end of the linear decay, it will keep steady at half the maximum value, until the note is released.
• Clicking on the top right Sync button enables Sync Mode. In this mode the envelope grid displays the current tempo bars, and the envelope is synchronized to the host tempo. When moving envelope points, these will “snap” to 1/32 beats, unless you maintain the “Shift” key pressed down.

Quick ADSR control

Rhino features controls for Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release (A, D, S, R) of all envelopes. Each envelope has its own “amount” control, defining how much these global ADSR controls impact the envelope times.
The A, D, S, R controls can be edited:

• Either directly, by dragging the displayed value at the top of the envelope window
• or by assigning them to any one of the user sliders, or to an external controller.

Envelope times modulation

The downwards triangles at the bottom of the envelope define how envelope segment durations will be affected by time modulations. For a given segment, the triangle marker indicates the shortest length this segment will have when modulation is applied.

Here is an example, first define an envelope with 1 second attack, and set the modulation marker (the little downwards pointing triangle) to 20 ms.

Then, use the Keyboard Time Modulation curve to define how this modulation is mapped across the keyboard, as shown in the image to the left.

With these settings, attack time will be 1 second for midi note C3, and 20ms for midi note C8. In between, it will move linearly from 1 second down to 20 ms.

Similarly, the Velocity Time Modulation curve can be used to control envelope times with velocity. And remember, each segment of the envelope has his own modulation marker !

The oscillators envelopes

Each oscillator has 4 associated envelopes:

• A level envelope (Osc Level) controlling the oscillator level.
• A waveshaping envelope (WS Amount) controlling the amount of waveshaping applied to the oscillator (when a waveshaper is selected. See below for details about the waveshapers)
• A pitch envelope (Osc Pitch) controlling the oscillator pitch.
• A phase envelope (Osc Phase) controlling the oscillator phase. This envelope is used together with the “Phase Mod” slider, which defines the range of the phase modulation applied by this envelope.

The pitch envelopes

In addition, there’s a global pitch envelope (Global Pitch), shared by all oscillators, that can be used to define a global vibrato. Both Osc Pitch and Global Pitch envelopes have a default value of 50, which is the nominal pitch. Values higher than 50 raise the pitch, below 50 lower the pitch. The picture below shows how to use this envelope to create a vibrato effect.

Because it is hard to control pitch accurately with an envelope, the pitch envelopes have an additional editing mode, shown to the right. In this mode, all points are displayed on a flat, horizontal axis, but each point displays the name of the closest note. When moving a point up and down, the envelope value is adjusted so that it accurately reaches the desired pitch.
To switch a pitch envelope view to this mode, use the “Edit Curve” option in the right-click menu.

Waveshaper

Each oscillator can have its own waveshaper. To enable the waveshaper, 3 steps are required:

• Turn it on using the little green button above the waveshaper window.
• Draw a waveshaping curve inside the waveshaper window, using the same actions (click and drag) than for editing an envelope.
• Draw a waveshaping envelope for the oscillator, using the oscillator envelope window.

The waveshaper uses CPU, so make sure it’s turned off (using the green button) for all oscillators that don’t require it.

The waveshaper curve is the shape that a saw wave will be turned into. The picture to the right illustrates this, showing how a sine wave is turned into the bottom shape by applying a waveshaping curve.

A waveshaper curve with no effect is therefore a straight line from the lower left corner to the upper right corner (although it would be much more CPU-efficient to simply disable the waveshaper).
When the waveshaper is in use, the waveform display will reflect the effect of the waveshaper on the current waveform.

Extreme waveshaping settings can cause aliasing in the upper octaves. The keyboard tracking WS Amount curve, described in the next chapter, should be used to limit the amount of waveshaping for higher notes.

Oscillator Keyboard tracking

Each oscillator has 11 associated keyboard tracking curves, to define how the played note position controls various parameters of the oscillator. The keyboard tracking window is used to edit these curves, and works similarly to the envelope window. The available curves are:

• Level: to control the oscillator level.
• Time: to control the oscillator envelope times. This works in conjunction with the dark downwards triangles at the bottom of the envelope window.
• Pitch: to control the oscillator pitch. Normally this is set to a straight line, but you can use this curve for special effects (like a “reversed keyboard”), or for limiting the pitch range of a given oscillator.
• Fine Amount: to control the intensity of the “pitch fine” slider over the keyboard.
• Detuning: to control the amount of a constant frequency offset which is added to the notes.
• WS Amount: to control the amount of waveshaping for this oscillator.
• WS Time: to control the waveshaping envelope times.
• Pitch Env. Level: to control the range of the pitch envelope for this oscillator
• Pitch Env. Time: to control the pitch envelope times
• Phase: to control the oscillator initial phase.
• FM Amount: to control the amount of Frequency Modulation.

In addition, there’s a global keyboard tracking curve (Global Pitch Amount), shared by all oscillators, that controls the range of the global vibrato envelope.

The keyboard tracking window can be scrolled by dragging the piano keyboard at the bottom of the window.

Oscillator Velocity and Aftertouch tracking

Each oscillator has 8 associated velocity tracking curves, and 2 aftertouch curves. These give more control over various parameters of the oscillator, for greater playability. Using these curves wisely is the key to designing great Rhino presets.
Rhino responds to both mono and poly aftertouch messages.

The available velocity curves, available in the Velocity/Aftertouch window, are:

• Level: to control the oscillator level.
• Time: to control the oscillator envelope times. This works in conjunction with the downwards triangles at the bottom of the envelope window.
• WS amount: to control the amount of waveshaping for this oscillator.
• WS time: to control the waveshaping envelope times.
• Pitch Env. Level: to control the range of the pitch envelope for this oscillator.
• Pitch Env. Time: to control the pitch envelope times.
• Phase: to control the oscillator initial phase.
• FM: to control the global amount of FM for this oscillator. This is like a global mixing control for all the FM inputs defined in the routing matrix.

The available aftertouch curves are:

• WS: to control the amount of waveshaping
• FM: to control the global amount of FM.

In addition, there are 2 global tracking curves (Global Pitch Amount), shared by all oscillators, to control the range of the global vibrato envelope with velocity or aftertouch