Overview
Nikolator is a software instrument that plays a Tesla coil.
It uses no recordings. Play a key and the coil fires again and again — how fast it fires is the pitch. What you hear is computed from the discharge heating and expanding the air, and from that pressure travelling through a room to a microphone.
So the panel is about the coil and its discharge rather than a synthesizer's waveforms and levels. Raise the bus voltage and the discharge grows stronger; widen the plasma channel and the sound grows darker.
Features
- Tesla coil discharge synthesis, no samples
- Driver, drive envelope, coil unit and voice sections
- Filter, modulation envelope, LFO and modulation matrix
- MONO (last-note priority) or eight-voice POLY
- 22 factory presets, and presets of your own
- Emergency stop
- Help text under the panel, in English and Japanese
- macOS: AUv2 / VST3 / Standalone, Windows: VST3
Sound as a By-product
A synthesizer usually picks a waveform, takes parts of it away with a filter, and shapes what is left with an envelope. Nikolator does not work that way.
What the model computes is a discharge, and the sound is what that discharge leaves behind: air heated and expanded fast enough to become a pressure wave. Change the voltage or the width of the plasma channel and the sound moves differently than a filter would move it. A thick source radiates high frequencies poorly, so widening the channel makes the instrument darker.
An Apparatus You Can Play
A real Tesla coil is not an instrument you play from a keyboard. Its circuit decides the frequency, its loudness is tied to the strength of the discharge, and chords do not happen.
Nikolator turns those relationships into playable parameters: up to eight voices, glide, pitch bend, and a modulation matrix that routes anything to anything. The behaviour of the apparatus stays; what changes is that you can play it.
The emergency stop is part of that. While it is held, nothing new sounds.
System Requirements
- macOS 10.15 or later on Intel, 11.0 or later on Apple Silicon (AUv2 / VST3 / Standalone, Universal arm64 + x86_64)
- Windows 10 64-bit or later (VST3, x64)