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
Musical Tesla coils can produce pitch by controlling the repetition rate of their discharges, and can also produce chords by time-interleaving pulse trains for multiple notes. In practice, polyphony is strongly constrained by the available discharge time, power, and thermal load.
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)