How To Make A Massive Uplifter With Harmor Synth Plugin

Image-Line’s Harmor is a five-star synth plugin practically for any type of sound or sound effect and in this tutorial I will show you how to make a mega uplifter with it quickly and easily.

Here’s a sound example:

Article Assets

Download Massive Harmor Uplifter .FST (This is just the Harmor preset file for the uplifter sound. Just drag and drop it on to Step Sequencer or Harmor and it should open.)

Download Massive Harmor Uplifter .FLP (This is FL Studio 11 project file. It contains the Harmor preset as well as the Piano Roll score for the uplifter.)

Ok. To replicate that, open the Harmor and first draw an 8 bar long C3 note to the Harmor’s Piano Roll. (NOTE that you’re free to stray from ANY of the settings I’m showing in this tutorial to create more interesting sounding uplifters!)

Now, first task is to thicken and stereoize the default Harmor sound which is just a standard saw wave and we are going to use the Unison effect for that.

So, under the Unison section set the Unison distribution (type) to Hz and Unison order to 6. (The unison types are different variations of pitch and panning spread and there’s five types to choose from. Order sets the number of unison voices.)

If you wonder how one can know what values to use and when I would say that Unison is a kind of effect you set by ear. At least that’s how I usually set it.

Next, go to the part B of the Harmor and activate it by clicking the switch. (There’s two parts in Harmor, A and B and both parts have an identical but independent synthesis options. The output of both parts are mixed together if the parts are activated.)

Now, under the Unison section (of the part B of course), leave the Unison type to Blurred (default), set the Unison order to 6 and raise the Pitch to 100%. (That’s the Unison pitch thickness and it sets the detuning across the unison voices.)

Next, strengthen the harmonics of the sound of the part B using the Harmonizer.

So, under the Harmonizer section, set the AMT (Harmonizer mix level) to 74%. (According to FL Studio manual, the Harmonizer clones and transposes the existing harmonics using various methods. So in this example, raising the Harmonizer mix level and leaving the other settings as is, it emphasises a higher pitch tone in the sound.)

Next, a bit of a distortion.

Go to the FX tab and enable Distortion by first choosing Classic as the Distortion type and set the Filter (it’s a highcut/lowpass filter) to all the way to top to let all the high frequencies pass through.

Next, compression.

Under the Compression section, choose Burning as the Compression type, drop the AMT (Compression amount) to 44% and increase the Low band (L) to 52% and High band (H) to 62%. Or set them according to your taste.

Next, reverb.

Under the Reverb section, first enable the reverb from the switch. Under the Options menu you’ll find some classic reverb presets. Choose Cathedral. Increase the Decay time to something like 7000-8000ms. And finally, set the highcut filter to around 10000Hz to let it pass through higher frequencies from the input signal (to make the reverb brighter).

The sound itself is ready. Final step is to make the pitch of the sound rise and that is done using slide notes in the Piano Roll.

So, open the Piano Roll view of the Harmor and draw an 8 bars long slide note of C7. This’ll create a slide from a note C3 to C7 over a time of 8 bars.

And finally, to make the uplifter rise higher and faster towards the end (like in my audio example), draw a two bars long slide note of C8 starting from bar 7.

That’s it! 😎

Watch the video version below: