EMBER

01Welcome

EMBER makes a sound bigger, warmer and louder. It saturates, compresses, clips and then pushes the level up to a ceiling just under 0 dB, so nothing ever overloads. Each stage is one switch and a few big knobs, and they run left to right in the order you hear them.

A second page, FORGE, splits the sound into four bands (COALS, FLAME, SPARK and SMOKE) and gives each its own heat, snap, echo, room and width. Around it all sit eleven modulation chips, a MIDI MAP, RANDOMIZE, undo and 58 presets in eleven folders.

02Installing

EMBER runs on macOS and Windows as a plugin in your DAW.

After installing, rescan plugins in your DAW if EMBER doesn't show up. It appears under Sequoia Synthesizers Co.

License and free trial

EMBER comes with a 14-day free trial with everything working. The first time you open it, a welcome window says hello; click GET STARTED and the activation panel opens.

1. Click Activate and sign in to your free Sequoia account (or make one) in the page that opens. Your trial starts there.
2. Bought EMBER? Click the trial status at the bottom of the window (or the gear › License / activate) and activate again with the same account: the full license replaces the trial.

EMBER checks the license in the background and keeps working offline for a month at a time. When the trial ends, EMBER goes quiet until you buy and activate it.

03Quick start

1. Put EMBER on a drum bus, a bass or a vocal. It starts clean: at its defaults it doesn't change the sound at all.
2. Turn LOUD up until it feels as loud and full as you want.
3. Add colour. BASS for weight, THICK for warmth and width, SOFT for punchy peaks. Set SUB to about 60–90 Hz to keep the sub clean, then sweep FOCUS to place the new harmonics.
4. Going loud? Add PUNCH to keep the drums hitting and CLARITY to stop the mix pumping.
5. Press UNITY to hear the change in tone at the same loudness, then turn it off again.
6. Not sure where to start? Click the preset name for the list of presets, or press RANDOMIZE. The ‹ arrow takes you back.

04The window

Values show in place of a knob's name while you hover over it or turn it. Click SIZE in the help bar, or drag the bottom-right corner, to resize the window; everything scales, and your size is saved with your song.

The LED meter

The meter at the far right of the header shows the output level with two rows of eleven square, domed LEDs (left channel on top, right below), labelled from -24 up to +6 in 3 dB steps. Green is comfortable, yellow (-3 and 0) is getting hot, and red (+3 and +6) is too loud. CLIP lights beside it when the level reaches the red.

The gear (settings and manual)

The Sequoia gear at the top-left corner opens a menu with this manual, the window size, fit to screen, the welcome screen, your license, your presets folder, our website and About EMBER.

The welcome window

The first time you open EMBER on a computer, a welcome window appears with a short hello, the version and buttons to GET STARTED or OPEN MANUAL. It only appears once on each computer. Bring it back any time with Welcome screen in the gear menu.

A / B, undo, size and the preset menu

A / B (in the header, right of SAVE). Two complete settings to compare. The lit letter is the one you hear: click the other letter to switch. The first time you click B it starts as a copy of A. The arrow between them copies the lit setting into the other one; right-click it for "Copy A to B" or "Copy B to A". Both are saved with your project, never in presets, and switching never clicks.

UNDO / REDO (the curved arrows left of the preset name). ⌘Z undoes and ⇧⌘Z redoes (Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y on Windows); Undo and Redo also sit at the top of every right-click menu. A whole knob turn is one step, and so are a preset load, INIT, an A / B switch or copy, a RANDOMIZE roll and a MIDI MAP change. Up to 100 steps; the help bar names each one. Automation from your DAW is never undone.

SIZE (bottom right, beside the version). SMALL, MEDIUM, LARGE or EXTRA LARGE, or FIT TO SCREEN. You can also drag the bottom-right corner. The whole window scales as one picture, so nothing moves around. Your project remembers its size, and new windows open at the size you used last.

The preset menu: click the preset name. A dropdown opens under it: one sub-menu per category, then MY PRESETS (the ones you saved), then Init: a fresh start, Load a preset file… and Show my presets folder. Pick one and it loads at once (one undo step). The tick shows the preset you have now.

• The big ‹ and › arrows beside the name step through every preset, one at a time.
• SAVE in the header opens SAVE PRESET: type a name and click the tags that fit, so you can find it again.

05Input

06Saturate and Spread

Weight, warmth and harmonics, with the sub kept clean and the new harmonics placed where you want them to rise.

Phantom

Bass you hear even where the speaker can't play it.

When your ear hears a run of harmonics (twice, three, four and five times a note's frequency), it fills in the note itself, even if that note isn't there. This is the "missing fundamental". PHANTOM picks off your bass below ROOT, makes those harmonics and lays them in just above it. On a phone, a laptop or earbuds, which can't play the deep note, the bass is still heard at full depth. On big speakers it gains weight and definition. The harmonics follow the bass's pitch and level by themselves, and they are added in mono, so the bass stays solid in mono.

PHANTOM sits in SATURATE and switches off with it. ROOT and COLOR only shape PHANTOM's harmonics: a thin lilac thread under the row joins the three (the dot marks PHANTOM, the one to turn up first). ROOT and COLOR show dimmed while PHANTOM is at 0, and turning one tells you to turn PHANTOM up first. On the display, the dashed line is ROOT (on AUTO it moves with the note it found, shown as "ROOT AUTO" with the frequency) and the lilac lines are the harmonics it adds.

The display above the knobs shows every SATURATE knob as you turn it: the blue hump is THICK (it sits at FOCUS and is as wide as SPREAD), the warm bump around 90 Hz is BASS, the block under 320 Hz is DEPTH, the strip on the left is the SUB, kept clean, and the lilac lines are PHANTOM's harmonics (the dashed line is its ROOT). It glows with what SATURATE is adding right now, and moves with any modulation chip on those knobs.

07Compress and Clip

Compress

Clip

08Loud

Makes everything louder while the peaks stay under a ceiling just under 0 dB (−0.3 dBFS). The ceiling is true peak: it also catches the peaks that form between the samples when the sound is played back or turned into an MP3, so streaming services and converters never clip it.

LOUD is the big knob. Moderate settings stay clean; high settings add crunch to the peaks. The five controls beside and below it are all off until you turn them up, so they never change a sound you already have. LIMIT shows how hard LOUD is working.

09Output

10The FORGE page

Four bands, each with its own fire. Click FORGE in the header; MAIN takes you back.

FORGE splits the sound into four bands and lets you treat each one on its own: widen the hats while the kick stays mono, throw an echo off the snare's crack while everything else stays dry, or heat up the body without touching the sub. It sits between CLIP and LOUD, so LOUD's ceiling still holds whatever you do here.

The display

The display shows the sound coming in, with the four bands shaded in their colours. Each band glows with its own level, and a band's LEVEL shows as a short line across it when you move it off 0 dB. Drag a line sideways to move a split; double-click it to put it back. The splits are steep (24 dB per octave), so each band really is on its own.

Drawing curves

Under LISTEN, SPLIT | TONE | HEAT | WIDTH sets what a drag on the display does. SPLIT moves the splits. The other three let you draw a curve with the mouse, right across the spectrum, each in its own colour: TONE in green, HEAT in ember orange, WIDTH in violet. The curve you are drawing is bright; the others stay faint so you can see everything at once. Hover to read the value under the mouse. Double-click, or press FLAT, to start a curve again.

The curves are saved with your song and with presets, UNDO takes back a stroke, and INIT flattens them. They switch off with the FORGE switch. A flat curve does nothing at all.

LISTEN

Press LISTEN and play your drums. After about four seconds of sound, EMBER places the three splits where your kit itself divides: between the kick and the body, the body and the crack, and the crack and the air. The help bar tells you where it put them. You can still drag them afterwards.

Each band

Across the bands

Every band knob and REPEATS, HALO SIZE and CLEAR take modulation chips: drop LFO 2 on SPARK's TRAIL, or ENV 1 on SMOKE's HALO. FORGE does nothing until you turn something on it, so it never changes a sound you already have.

11Quality and latency

QUALITY runs the saturation and clipping at two or four times the sample rate for cleaner highs. 2X is the default; 4X is the cleanest and uses the most CPU. OFF uses the least.

LOUD looks a moment ahead (1.5 ms, plus a quarter of a millisecond to measure the true peak) so it can catch every peak before it arrives. Your DAW is told about the delay and lines everything up for you. LIVE cuts the delay to a few samples for playing or recording through EMBER, with slightly less precise peak control.

12Modulation

CHIPS are Sequoia's exclusive drag-and-drop modulation. Drag any chip onto any knob and it moves that knob. No menus, no matrix to set up first.

Making a routing

1. Drag a chip onto any knob. A coloured arc appears round the knob, with a dot at each end. The arc shows how far the source sweeps the knob.
2. Drag the dots to set the range. Each dot moves on its own, further out or back in, and the other dot stays put. The knob only comes along when you pull a dot past it. When both dots sit together, the first move picks: drag up for the top dot, down for the bottom one.
3. Right-click the knob to remove a routing, flip it with Invert, or add one with Modulate with.

The two dots

Two-way sources (LFO 1–3, RANDOM and KEY) swing both ways round the knob. The upper dot sets how far the source pushes the knob up; the lower dot sets how far it pulls it down. The two don't have to match: an LFO can reach far up and only a little down. When the source is above its middle EMBER uses the upper amount; when it is below, the lower one.

• Pull a dot past the knob's pointer and the knob follows that dot. The other dot still stays exactly where it is.
• Right-click the knob › the source › Mirror the two ends puts the two dots back to even: both ends become the average of the two, shrunk to fit around the knob, never below 10%.
• Even arcs. When you drop a two-way chip on a knob, it gets the same room on both sides: the two end dots sit the same distance from the knob, even when the knob is not in the middle. If the knob is close to an end (within 10%), it can only move one way, so the arc keeps its full depth. One-way chips are unchanged. Dropping the same chip on the same knob again evens it the same way. Songs and presets you saved earlier keep their arcs exactly as they were.
• Alt-drag the knob to move both ends together.
• The right-click menu shows both amounts, for example LFO 1 UP 30% DOWN 5%.

One-way sources (ENV 1–3, VELO, WHEEL and PRESS) move the knob only one way. Their arc starts at the knob and you drag its far end. Drag it past the knob to make the source turn the knob down instead of up. The far dot never moves the knob. The dot on the knob does nothing when pulled toward the far dot; pulled out the other way, past the knob, it carries the knob with it.

Sliders take chips too. Drop a chip on the A H D S R sliders in the ENV window and a thin lane appears beside the slider in the source's colour, with a dot at each end: drag either dot to set how far it reaches that way, just like a knob's arc. While the source moves it, the slider's cap rides the live value and a small tick marks where you set it. Up to three per slider; an ENV can't move its own window's sliders.

Up to three per knob. A knob takes three modulations at most, chips and MIDI MAP together. Their arcs sit one outside the next in the order you added them; if there isn't room round a knob, its dial is drawn a little smaller while it has them. A fourth is refused and the help bar says so: right-click the knob to remove one first.

Automation. Both dots of every routing are parameters in your host (Mod 1 Amount and Mod 1 Amount Down, and so on), so you can automate each end. While a source moves, the knob moves with it: the pointer follows, a dot rides each arc at that source's own speed, and a small tick shows where you set the knob.

The sources

A knob can have several sources, and one source can move many knobs: up to 32 routings in all. Click an ENV or LFO chip to open its card; while it's open, every knob it moves lights up in its colour. Click it again, press Esc, or click outside to close it.

What can be modulated

INPUT · BASS, THICK, DEPTH, SUB, FOCUS, SPREAD, PHANTOM, ROOT, COLOR · COMP, BODY · SOFT, CRUNCH · LOUD, PUNCH, CLARITY, SHAPE, WIDTH · MIX · on the FORGE page: HEAT, SNAP, TRAIL, HALO, SPAN and LEVEL on every band, REPEATS, HALO SIZE and CLEAR.

Routings are saved with your song and with presets.

13MIDI MAP

Play the controls from your keyboard or controller: the mod wheel, aftertouch, a pedal or any knob or slider.

1. Click MIDI in the header. SOURCE starts on MOD WHEEL. Pick another from the menu, or click LEARN and move a knob on your controller.
2. + ADD a control from the list, or choose CUSTOM and just touch the knob, slider or button you want. Repeat to make one source move several controls at once.
3. Set each one's DEPTH: how far the controller pushes the knob from where you set it, like a chip's arc. A minus DEPTH turns it the other way.

Shortcut: right-click any knob and choose Map to MIDI. Mapped controls show a small tag: MW for mod wheel, AT for aftertouch, CC74 and so on. A mapped knob also shows a pink arc; drag its end dot to set the depth.

Mappings are saved with your song, not with presets.

14Randomize and undo

RANDOMIZE

RANDOMIZE rolls a whole new EMBER setting. ‹ steps back, all the way to the sound you started from, and › steps forward again.

• Right-click RANDOMIZE to choose how far it goes: MILD (nudge the current sound), MEDIUM (a new, musical sound) or WILD (wider ranges, plus one to three new modulation routings).
• In the same menu you can lock a stage so RANDOMIZE leaves it as it is.
• Now and then a roll gives a FORGE band some heat, snap, a trail or a halo; WILD can move the splits as well.
• RANDOMIZE never touches INPUT, OUTPUT, TARGET, UNITY, BYPASS, QUALITY, LIVE, the FORGE switch, the bands' M and S, or your MIDI MAP. LOUD always stays on, so every roll stays under the ceiling, and MIX stays at 20% or more.

Undo and redo

Every change can be undone, up to 100 steps back, including RANDOMIZE, LISTEN, a drawn FORGE curve, presets, A / B, modulation and MIDI MAP changes. A whole knob turn is one step. Use the curved arrows in the header or the keys below; Undo and Redo also sit at the top of every right-click menu.

Help tips

The help bar at the bottom always explains whatever the mouse is over. With HELP on, a tip also pops up beside the control. Close a tip with the × at its top-right corner once you know that control; right-click a control to bring its tip back, or right-click HELP to bring them all back.

15Presets and files

Click the preset name for the preset menu (see The window): a dropdown with one sub-menu per category, MY PRESETS, Init, Load a preset file… (from anywhere) and Show my presets folder. The ‹ and › arrows step through every preset; SAVE names and tags your own. A preset keeps your OUTPUT, BYPASS, QUALITY and LIVE as they are.

Factory presets

EMBER has 58 presets built in. Click the preset name and each category below is its own sub-menu:

Copies of the factory presets that an older EMBER installed in a Factory folder move into _old factory presets the first time this version runs, so they don't show twice; any you changed stay where they were, as your own. If you had the first set of factory presets, its Older Factory Presets folder stays, and its presets show under MY PRESETS, so nothing you used is lost.

Your own presets show under MY PRESETS in the preset menu. Folders you make in the preset folder are included too.

16Sound recipes

17Troubleshooting

18Credits

Interface type: Space Grotesk and IBM Plex Mono (SIL Open Font License).