User Guide / Tutorial 1.

07
EXPLORATION IS OUR NATURE
“The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song
of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance.

Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all

epochs and meridians: I am tormented with an everlasting
itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…

Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But
those other worlds —promising untold opportunities—
beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.”

Carl Sagan
THANK YOU …
… for your interest in NOVUM!

NOVUM extends the possibilities of creative sampling:

• Decomposing one sound into 6 layers that can be edited separately

• A unique representation of sound where timbre is separated from temporal evolution
• Granular synthesis engine with 6 individual layers
• Classical sound shaping like analog modelled lter and comb lter
• Innovative sound shaping like the “Timbre Flower” or “Syntify”
• An inspiring drag and drop work ow to extract and combine elements
from different patches

NOVUM has been designed with great care and dedication to give
your creative hands the best possible tool. I hope you will nd lots
of fun and inspiration while exploring its exciting sonic possibilities!

You can contact me via peter@dawesomemusic.com

All the best

Peter V
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GETTING STARTED TIP

This involves two steps:

1 Install the software

This is straight forward: download the right installer for your system ( .pkg for Mac and .exe for Win).
You can start the installer with double-click … I guess you have done this before. Novum gives an indication if the content pack has
not been installed. Don’t forget the second step!
We provide a free trial for 90 days without limitations. To start your trial:
Open one instance of NOVUM in your DAW. Click “UNLOCK” and provide your tracktion.com credentials.

If you have purchased NOVUM the activation works in the same way:
Open one instance of NOVUM in your DAW, click “UNLOCK” and provide your tracktion.com credentials.

2 Install the Basic Sound Pack

NOVUM comes with a pack of samples and patches. This is a separate download - you don’t want to download multiple GB for
every tiny software update.

Download the BasicsPackNovum.zip and unzip it. You can freely chose a location for storing this pack, SSD is recommended.
Open NOVUM in your DAW and drag and drop the unpacked folder “BASICS” to the NOVUM plugin.
This registers the pack with NOVUM and now all sounds from the pack are available in NOVUM.

Now you can start to explore NOVUM - enjoy and have fun!
You may also want to have a look to some short tutorials.
START YOUR FREE TRIAL

Novum comes with a 90 days free trial - without

limitations.

Open a single instance of Novum and click UNLOCK to

start the free trial.

After expiration you can still use Novum, but saving is

disabled and every few minutes the sound generation
will be interrupted by a few seconds noise.
OVERVIEW
Click to edit the
current name and Click to save the patch.
save the patch with Turns orange if there are Undo and Redo of
the new name unsaved changes last operation

Select Patches here

Modulation sources
that are used in the
patch
Enter a text to lter patches that
appear in the browser below

Displays the
Scroll to browse Patches
waveform of the
current patch
To open a patch either right click or
drag and drop on the Patch Selector

Click to switch
between the 6 layers

Click to enable or
disable tooltips The UI is resizable. Drag
to shrink or expand

Displays incoming
Select Pages for editing
midi notes
the current patch
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 LOAD AND STORE PATCHES TIPS
• Feel free to explore and just try things out.
NOVUM is a creative tool and you can always use
UNDO if something is messed up.
Click and type a name for your new
The SAVE button has turned orange -
6 patch. Press the SAVE button to store 5 this indicates unsaved changes. • You can also click on the “Burger Menu” in the
your patch.
upper left - this opens a popup-menu that gives
organised access to all patches.

START HERE • Novum is highly optimised, but it needs to perform

complex computations. Hence some patches
require a few seconds to load. This is indicated
with “PROCESSING …” below the waveform.
Click and enter “FLUTE”
1 to lter the patches
• Can’t hear sound? First make sure that NOVUM
receives midi notes. Any incoming midi note is
displayed in the virtual keyboard at the very
bottom of the plugin.

In the upper right there is a level meter displaying

the generated output that is send to your DAW.
Drag and drop one patch from the Some patches have a slow attack, you may need
2 sidebar to the patch selector. to press for longer time.

The patch is now loaded.

Click on the power buttons to switch

4 individual layers off or on.

Click on SYN and change a few sliders,

3 eg the lter cutoff and dirt to your liking.

If the new patch name matches the

7 lter it will appear in the side bar.
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BROWSING PATCHES TIPS

START HERE • When you hoover over the lter letter you can see
the full name of the pack below in the plugin in the
info line.
This displays the name
Use < and > to load the next or 1 of the current patch.
2 previous patch in the current selection of
patches in the sidebar.

Activate FILTERS for each pack.

3
F - Factory
U - USER

Any other letter stands for one

pack of patches that you have
registered.

Click on the star symbol to select

4 only your favourites.

Click on the gold star next to a

patch to make it a favourite.
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TIMBRE & COLOUR TIPS
• You can shift-click or right-click the on/off buttons
for soloing a layer. This is especially handy to
modify a sound.

Switch individual Select a different • Sometimes the sound of a single layer will be very
2
Click and drag on the wave display
to see the individual layers.
3 layers on and off. 4 layer by clicking. … irregular. Try “HOMOGENIZED” to get a better
quality of a single layer. This setting will be
explained later.

Load the patch

6 Left-click the timbre dot to edit the colour.
1 “FLUTE PHRASE”

START HERE

The “Timbre ower” offers variations of the sound of the

current layer. The original timbre is in the center. To the right
the timbre becomes more noise like, to the top the sound
5 becomes softer and duller, to the bottom more synth like.
Best way to understand this is by soloing the layer and to
experiment.
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ENVELOPES TIPS
• When editing envelopes you may sometimes
experience a somewhat crushed sound quality.
Go to the TIMBRE tab and try “HOMOGENIZE”.
3 Click on ENV to edit the envelope. This will be explained later.
Switch individual layers on and off.
2 Select a different layer by clicking.

Edit the loop range and start point.

Load the patch
4 Or use the sliders for this.
1 “CRUSH LOOP”

START HERE

Draw a new envelope.

5 Messed it up? Click “ORIGINAL” to start again.
Or use UNDO / REDO.
 COMBINE SOUNDS TIPS
• When editing envelopes you may sometimes
When you drag the patch all timbres from the experience a somewhat crushed sound quality,
current patch (LIGETI FLUTES) will be especially if your sound material has a lot of
4 exchanged with the timbres from the patch transients in it.
Type “BELL” in the search eld. CHURCH BELL
3 In such cases you can use “HOMOGENIZE” from
Then drag the patch “CHURCH the timbre tab - this removes the “phase”
BELL” onto the line of timbre dots. information in the sound while maintaining the
envelope.

Now nd the patch “808 LOOP” and drop it on the

line of envelopes. This exchanges the existing
envelopes with the one from the patch you
dropped.
5
This is a powerful way to combine the temporal
START HERE characteristics of one sample with the timbral
characteristics of a different sample.

Load the patch

1 “LIGETI FLUTES”
Sometimes you want to exchange only a

On the FX page switch off the

6 single timbre or a single envelope. To do this
click the patch in the sidebar. It opens a
2 SHIMMER to make the following detailed view. From there you can drag single
changes better audible. timbres or envelopes and drop them onto a
layer.
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 DRAG AND DROP DROP
This is an overview of the various ways to drag and
drop elements from other patches to create new ones.
Drop to the PATCH NAME to open
the patch.

Drop to the WAVE DISPLAY to

exchange all timbres and envelopes.
DRAG It will leave lters, modulations, FX
unchanged.

Drag the WAVEFORM from the

sidebar to drag all envelopes and
timbres at the same time.
Drop here to exchange timbres and/
or envelopes (depending on what
you actually dragged).

Click a patch to show its elements.

Drag from there to exchange only
one timbre + envelope.

If you only want a timbre (w/o the

envelope) or only an envelope (w/o
timbre) hold SHIFT before starting
the drag.

You can also drag envelopes / Drop any audio le on the WAVE Drop an audio le here to import it
timbres from one layer of the current
patch to another layer of the current
AUDIO FILES DISPLAY to decompose the audio as a sample for this speci c layer.
into 6 layers.
patch.
You can drag audio les from
.wav your le system. If you drop an audio le to the
sidebar NOVUM will rst load the
INIT sound and then decompose
the audio into 6 layers.
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 IMPORT SAMPLES Now take an audio sample and drag it on the wave
display. By doing so the sample will be analysed and
TIPS
“decomposed”:
• Decomposing samples involves a lot of complex
computations and may hence take a while.
NOVUM creates 6 timbres and 6 envelopes from your
Usually samples of 5 - 30 seconds length are
3 sample.
handled reasonably fast due to the highly
START HERE NOTE: all other settings of the existing patch remain
optimised code of NOVUM
unchanged. So you will get very different results
depending on the patch you have loaded before • It is not recommended to use mp3 compressed
Take any audio sample from importing. audio if you can avoid this. The compression
1 your computer and drop it on a artifacts become more pronounced through the
layer to import it. decomposition and pitching happening in
NOVUM.

.wav • 44.1 or 48 khz sampling rate works perfectly ne

for almost all cases. Sometimes 96 kHz samples
can even degrade the sound quality, as there is
more information that needs to be encoded in the
decomposition.

• When all the 6 layers of a decomposed sound are

Repeat this with different samples on played back simultaneously you hear the original
2 different layers to create complex sample with no quality loss. However, the sound
layerings. engine uses granular synthesis, so depending on
the settings for GRAINS and GRAIN EMITTER
(and the lter and FX) the sound you hear may be
completely different from your original sound.

• NOVUM uses machine learning algorithms to

decompose audio. These have been optimised to
work well in a musical instrument - that is: low or
no polyphony.

When you drop a sample on the

sidebar NOVUM will rst load the
4 “INIT” le and afterwards decompose
your sample.
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 GRANULAR ENGINE TIPS

• Granular synthesis works by playing a lot of tiny

START HERE snippets of the source audio - these are called
grains.

1 Load the patch “FLUTE PHRASE” • Located on the ENV tab there are all the settings
for the start position of the grains. Especially the
loop points are referring to the start position of the
If you press the key Ab3 you hear a
grains. If a grain starts shortly before the end of
short ute - exactly as it has been
the loop, but has a long duration you will still hear
recorded.
audio from beyond the loop locator!

To avoid this you can work with short grains.

If you play a chord you will notice

2 that the playback speed does not
change with pitch - hence the sample
plays back in harmony.

You can alter the playback speed,

3 independent of the pitch.

There are two modes for the playback speed.

In RELATIVE mode the center position of
speed refers to the original speed of the
recording.

In ABSOLUTE mode the center position is There are a couple of settings for the
one Hz: the whole sample will play back once 4 playing direction.
per second.
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GRANULAR SYNTHESIS START HERE
TIPS
• In addition to being so much fun Granular
synthesis is one of the most powerful techniques
Grain size refers to the length of
First put a lower value to density. You will now hear 1 each grain.
around. In the very beginning it takes a bit until
2 that the sound fades in and out rhythmically. That’s a you are familiar with it and how to twiddle the
parameters to achieve what you want. However:
nice effect, but it's more important that you understand,
why this is happening: as we have fewer grains the end result is worth it!
playing, there are times where no grain is playing.
• Did you know? Almost all professional techniques
to alter playback speed, for example in your DAW,
work based on granular synthesis.

If you now reduce the SIZE the grains become

3 shorter. To maintain the same average density
more grains need to be generated per second -
the pulsation goes faster.

So far the pulsation is very regular. We can PAN JIT works in a similar way and adds
add randomness to the “birth date” of grains
4 with EMIT JIT. Increase this to make the
6 randomness to the panning of each
grain. This can create rich stereo even
pulsation go wild. from mono material.

POS JIT adds randomness to the grain

5 position within the sample. This is one of the
most important parameters to shape the
granular sound. When “HOMOGENIZED” is active it is
7 displayed in green. Use this when:
you want a smooth sound
you want to remove transients
you want to edit / exchange the
envelope
EDIT PARAMETERS TIPS
• The combination of linking sliders and allowing
individual modulations is powerful but needs to be
tamed a bit to remove unrewarded complexity. In
START HERE NOVUM it works like this: every slider exists 7
times - 6 for individual ones for each layer and a
“global” slider that is used in the “LINKED” case.
Many parameters are available per
Modulations are always assigned to exactly one
1 layer. But always editing everything 6
of these sliders. So if you add modulations in the
times can be tedious.
“LINKED” state and then UNLINK them, these are
not transferred to the individual layers. If you LINK
If the LINK symbol is orange the again you will have your original modulations
parameter is the same for all 6 back. Sounds complicated? Just try it out - you
layers. This is the normal and will see that this is really simple.
convenient way.

Click on the link symbol to unlink or

2 link a parameter. When a parameter
is unlinked it can have different
values for each layer.
The name of the currently selected slider is
4 always displayed here.

When a parameter is unlinked you can

3 modulate it for each layer separately.

Modulating a parameter is really simple: click

on the parameter and then dial in the
5 modulation amount (positive or negative) with
the circular dial next to the modulation source.
MODULATION SOURCES TIPS
• With a few Modulations you can turn any boring
sound into something thats interesting. Almost
START HERE any parameter in NOVUM can be modulated.

• You can also modulate the parameters of the

Load any patch that you like and switch 2 Click the + and add an LFO Modulators. For example you can modulate the
1 to the MOD tab. rate of one LFO with another LFO. This allows
you to setup complex, chaotic movements in your
sound.

You can set multiples of the RATE by clicking

6 here. If you have SYNCed to your host tempo
Go to the SYN page, click on FREQ so this ensures that you have multiples of the
that it turns purple and then dial in some host tempo.
3 amount of LFO in uence with the circle
dial next to the LFO

Change the RATE of the LFO. Click Burger Menu to select a different
4 5 waveform. Or draw it with the mouse.

Click SYNC to take the tempo

from your host. You can also drag and drop any
envelope from your sound or from the
sidebar to the LFO. The AMT slider allows you to change
the strength of the LFO. This
7 becomes powerful once you modulate
this (with a different modulator).
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MIDI AND MPE Click here to change the CC, eg from TIPS
5 Modwheel to CC11 (Expression).
• Good musical instruments respond to user input.
In NOVUM you can achieve this by modulating
parameters with midi input.

• NOVUM also offers MPE - this is really powerful

and intuitive for sound design. It allows you to
+
Click the below the Modulator section “play” timbre with PRESSURE and SLIDE … and
1 to the right and select “CC”. This will add it does not require advanced keyboard skills.
a CC Modulator.

Per default it listens to MODWHEEL.

Go to the SYN page, click on FREQ so

that it turns purple and then dial in some
2 amount of CC in uence with the circle
dial next to the Modulator.

On the MOD page you can now see that

this modulator acts on FREQ.

Turn the modwheel on your Edit the MAP to impact how the MODWHEEL should in uence the
3 controller. You can now hear that 4 sound.
the modwheel in uences the lter
cutoff frequency. Double click to remove a point, click to move / add points.

In this example low values of MODWHEEL will have maximum impact,

and if you turn the modwheel up on your midi controller the in uence will
be less.
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FILTERS, DISTORTION AND SYNTIFY TIPS
• SYNTIFY works best with material that does not
contain too much sustained noise and lower
pitches.
START HERE
• You can also use SYNTIFY to give dull synth
sounds more clarity, dirt and bite.

1 Load the patch “MYSTERIOUS FLUTE”

• COMB lters are the most underrated tool in
electronic music despite having many
applications. Use them to add a slight gloss of
light and air - in a way that can’t be achieved with
an EQ. Or to give any sound a metallic avour.
Go to the SYN page and play with Modulate the frequency to add interest and
2 the DIRT. This is a nonlinear complexity.
distortion in the feedback path of
the analog lter - it interacts with • COMB lters are also excellent on transient
your settings of resonance and material like drum loops or eld recordings. With
cutoff frequency. high amounts of feedback they “ring” on
transients similar to a plucked string.

Now switch on SYNTIFY and play

3 with the slider. This takes any
sound and transforms it as if a
synthesizer generated it.

There are two different modes A and B for

Now dial in some amount of the COMB lter. Most likely the Also try SYNTIFY and COMB on
SYNTIFY with a different sound character. This
4 of course highly depends on your source 5 effect will be subtle unless you also dial in some amount of 6 different material, eg drum loops.
feedback. There are vast possibilities and it's fun
material.
to explore and experiment!

Now play with the FREQ of the COMB lter. Especially try
values close to -1 and 1 and the extremes.
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 FX TIPS
• You can bypass the FX section by clicking on the
green power switch (it will turn gray).
START HERE
• PRO-TIP: There are two busses for FX. You can
switch between BUS 1 and BUS 2 by clicking on
the little number on the left.
Load any patch that you like and switch On the SYN tab there are two sliders OUT1 and
1 to the FX tab. OUT2. By modulating these sliders you can send
different amounts of your signal to OUT1 and
OUT2. By doing so you can have your FX
respond differently per voice.

+
Click the and select any effect to add
2 a new audio effect.

Audio effects in the signal chain are after

the lter section. All voices are summed
and the combined output goes into the
FX section.

You can change the sequence of FX

3 simply by drag and drop.

You can change the routing of FX by Every FX has additional parameters to Every FX has some presets. You can
4 clicking on the little triangles: either the 5 tweak it. You can switch between FX by 6 select these with the burger menu.
FX are chained, or the FX are parallel. clicking on the FX in the FX-Rack.
You can also store your current
The current FX is displayed in gold colour. setting as a preset. Click the burger
menu, choose SAVE AS and enter a
name for the preset.
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SAMPLE MANAGEMENT
NOVUM is based on samples, and hence the sampling content needs to be stored somewhere. Normally NOVUM takes care for
this completely in the background, but you can also tweak the behaviour if you want/need.

Normally the patches do store only references to the sample data. This has two advantages: patches can be stored and loaded via
the DAW much faster. And multiple patches can share the sample as it is stored only once. If you want to exchange a few patches
with someone else you can select “EMBED SAMPLES IN PATCH” via the main burger menu. CAUTION: don’t forget to deactivate
this afterwards - otherwise opening projects in your DAW my take quite a long time - not recommended!

If you are dealing with tons of samples you may want to specify the location where sample data is stored. In NOVUM you can add
multiple locations. To do so click “MANAGE SAMPLE LOCATIONS” in the main burger menu.

To add or remove locations use the context menu.

Note: packs do contain their own sample data.

These are not listed here, NOVUM takes care for
this in the background when you register a pack

Click+ to add a new location

where you want to store sample
content for NOVUM.

When you import audio to NOVUM the audio le is processed, and

NOVUM creates its own les to store the processed sample data. Hence
TIP
there always needs to be one “active” location, where new audio data is
stored. This is displayed in gold. You can make a new location to be the When you import audio NOVUM will always create
“active” location via context menu. its own representation of the sample. So it does not
matter if you erase or move the original sample.
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CREATE A PATCH PACK PRO-TIP
• It is recommended to normally not use “EMBED
Sometimes you want to create a PACK to distribute your patches to other people. SAMPLES IN PATCH”. But you may nd yourself
NOVUM has built-in support to make this a simple task. in the situation that you have a few patches that
have their samples embedded.

For such a case there is a hidden special

1 Create a folder that contains all your patches for the pack function. Hold SHIFT and click the main burger
menu. Now there will be an additional menu entry
“CREATE PACK …”
You don’t have to do this in NOVUM, you can simply use your lesystem and copy the
patches where you want them. You can have one level of subfolders. The names of these The difference with “COLLECT SAMPLES …” is
that it will also go through all patches, load them
subfolders will later appear as categories in your pack. and re-saves them without samples embedded.

CAUTION: this may take a while. You will get a

short noti cation in the info bar below.
2 CAUTION: Make a copy of this folder CAUTION: this overwrites your existing patches in
the pack folder. Hence I STRONGLY ADVISE to
According to Murphy's law something will go wrong, you don’t want to lose your work! make a copy before - otherwise this may end up
in catastrophic loss of your patches if something
goes wrong.

3 Collect all the samples for the pack

In the main burger menu select “COLLECT SAMPLES …”
Afterwards you can select a folder with patches.
Novum will now go through all the patches and collect all sample data needed and copy it
into one subfolder called “lane_sources”

4 Zip the folder and distribute it

Whomever wants to use your pack simply unzips the pack on their system and then uses
drag and drop of the unzipped folder to NOVUM. This will register the pack in NOVUM -
all patches are now available.
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THE UNDERLYING TECHNOLOGY

The engine of NOVUM works with granular synthesis. This cuts the sound in hundreds and thousands of tiny particles, each may be
only a few ms of length. This is quite an interesting technique, its simple and powerful at the same time. If you want to really go deep
I recommend the book “Microsound” by Curtis Roads.

The decomposition uses a machine learning technology called “Non-negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF)”. There is a huge body of
research around NMF and a myriad of variations and applications. NMF works on the Short-Time-Fourier-Transformation (STFT), so
it takes the signal and creates a 2D representation. This is interpreted as a matrix and NMF computes a low-rank approximation of
the Matrix. You can afterwards use Wiener-Filtering to recover the individual layers in a way that the sum of layers gives you back
the original sound. There are a couple of caveats with the normal NMF algorithms when applied to sound: the phase information is
not used, transients get muddy, the envelopes are often not intuitive. So it has been a long journey for me to address these issues
and come up with my own solutions - such that it really works in the context of a sound design / music instrument.

A very important aspect of designing an instrument is its interface. This goes far beyond matters of taste and how things look like. One of the advantages of
representing sound with NMF layers is that you can mix and match individual elements. But for doing so you need to have some visual hints, otherwise you
will always operate in the blind. This problem is one of the origins of the “represent timbres with colours” concept in NOVUM and Abyss. For doing so any
sound is translated rst into a frequency representation. You can view this as a point in a (very) high dimensional space. But the colour space has only 3
dimensions, so you take hundreds and thousands of timbres and then apply dimension reduction techniques. This allows you to assign a colour to every
timbre. It requires some additional work to make this intuitive (for example such that noises are gray/white or warm sounds are more orange etc).

As NOVUM anyways needs to compute the fourier transform this can also be used to modify the spectrum, by using so called “spectral” techniques. These
can be very powerful, but there are two disadvantages: it's heavy on CPU and when modulating you get very ugly sound artefacts. Hence I carefully chose a
few things that can be done only in the spectral domain, but computing this in the background.

SYNTIFY is another innovation in NOVUM. It is based on the idea of representing sound neither in the time domain, nor in the frequency domain, but in a so called
“nonlinear phase state”. In this way sound becomes a trajectory of an object ying through a high dimensional abstract space. And then you can change the physics
of this space to modify the trajectory and hence the sound. This is based on the theory of nonlinear dynamic systems and differential equations. It took me quite
a while to make this applicable to sound, but I believe this approach is very powerful and SYNTIFY is just the rst application. This is unexplored ground and
currently my main area of research, so you can expect to see and hear more applications of this over the next years.
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CREDITS - Part 1
I am standing on the shoulder of giants, and many people supported the creation of NOVUM:

EIGEN is a C++ template library for linear algebra. NOVUM uses the MPL2-licensed features. A copy of the MPL2 license is available here
Nigel Redmon has published an intriguing series series about analog ADSRs. I took inspiration and design choices from his series.
Valdemar Erlingsson is the creator of the gorgeous reverb plugin called Cloud Seed . I took inspiration from his work for the CLOUDS fx in NOVUM
NOVUM is implemented in C++ using the Juce Framework. I am grateful for its existence and for the community of JUCE developers.
Some patches use CC0 samples from Versilian Studios Chamber Orchestra Community Edition
tracktion.com - like a band needs a label, every plugin designer needs a partner. I enjoy the excellent cooperation within their unique Tracktion
presents program

Sound Designer and Early Access

DATABROTH has been tremendous supportive with ideas and feedback starting from the rst concepts of NOVUM. His channel is an everlasting
source of surprise inspiration - if you haven’t done it already: go and subscribe to his channel!
Yuli Yolo is well known for his sound design work with U-He, UVI, Arturia, Tracktion and many more. He provided feedback, encouragement and
also found a few bugs.
Tomavatars has been amongst the rst users and provided a lot of detailed feedback. NOVUM has become a better tool because of his feedback.
Resonate Sound Design tested NOVUM, provided feedback and contributed some lovely patches
Andrew Madden aka Audilepsy has been a creative sounding board when NOVUM was more of a pipe dream then a concept
C-You FX helped plating out a lot of small issues, tested Mac OS 10.13 compatibility and provided patches
the_jules found bugs and had multiple useful suggestions that found its way into NOVUM
Chris from Synphaera Records provided valuable feedback on the plugin and the manual
Felix Petrescu akaMakunouchi Bento provided feedback and samples
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CREDITS - Part 2
Beta Testing:
Philip Rampi - especially helped me to get this running on “ancient” laptop
Florian Mrugalla develops plugins and created insightful videos of his rst hours with NOVUM
Benjamin Harrison aka c0nsilience spent a lot of his time to review this manual and correct my spelling. He is an inspiring renaissance man and
has every plugin that I have ever heard of (and many more). He always pushes me to strive for perfection.
Douglas Hill aka tau(n)t
Steven Frazier aka Saf Ro
lab by the sea
Sven Stumm - provided essential feedback on design aspects of the UI

Last not least:

Margrit Töpfner played the ute and provided a grand piano to sample from
Bee Abney and Thomas Schimmack provided samples as challenges for my wild claim: “you can make nice instruments from any sample”
The VI-control forum has been supportive and acted as a nice sounding board for ideas and concepts
Temme Sikkema (aka doctoremmet) helped me to get in touch with a lot of people and was always encouraging
My kids Aya and Kiro have been very generous with feedback ( “papa, this sucks” ). After many frustrating approaches one day I had a version of
NOVUM that got them really hooked, and I watched how they explored mangling sounds and “painting” sound waves. This was the point where I
knew that I got the interface just right - we can learn a lot from the playful approach of children!
Daniel Al att and Alex Gamma send in more spell corrections for the manual
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ABOUT ME
My name is Peter V and I am the creator of Novum.
It is my third instrument after Abyss and Chop Suey.

I am a musician by heart, playing the bassoon and

contrabassoon in multiple ensembles and I have a
lifelong passion for synthesisers.

Also I have a PhD in maths (I love maths!) - which I

guess quali es me as a professional nerd.

I have a couple of core beliefs that drive my work:

‣ You have the talent. And I am so curious to hear what's possible with the instruments I make.
‣ Visual Arts can be a source of inspiration for sound design and music and enriches the way you think and create sound.
‣ Intuition over numbers. When I make music, I rarely (want to) think in numbers and maths, I want my creative process to ow with intuition.
‣ Nuanced response. When I play the bassoon it feels like the instrument and I are united - the instrument responds to every subtle change in
tension, breath or posture. This nuanced response is the quality of any good instrument and its this quality I am striving for in the design process of
my instruments
‣ Simplicity rules. Life is already complex enough. User interfaces shall be as simple as possible, and its worth to go the extra mile.
‣ Quality over Marketing. I believe paying attention to details and striving for the near-perfect is a better use of my resources then running
expensive marketing campaigns. Please spread the word if you want to support my work!

Thank you very much for your interest and support!

PS: you can contact me via peter@dawesomemusic.com

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