AVIARY
Theme
Aviary presents

BITTERN

The Bass Synth — five rave legends, your knobs.
No installs · five calls · one HTML file · GULAR inside.

A bittern's boom carries two miles from a bird you will almost never see — the underground's own species. BITTERN loads five distinctive, timeless rave basses — acid, hoover, reese, hardstyle, psy — as starting points, then hands you every screw: the wave, the filter, the envelopes, the LFO, the slide. The legends are the front door; the playground is the house.

localhost — BITTERN · The Bass Synth
The BITTERN reed bed mid-pattern
Drop a screenshot of the reed bed in here.
Save it next to this file as bittern-reeds.png and refresh.
The reed bed mid-acid — slides leaning, accents glowing, the call chip already let go.
Why this exists

Problem · Resolution · Reason

The sounds that raised the rave are everywhere — and untouchable.

01 · THE PROBLEM

Legends behind glass

You know these five in one note: the acid squelch, the hoover dive, the reese beating, the hardstyle scoop, the psy roll. Hearing them costs nothing. Touching them costs a museum's worth of hardware, a $400 clone, or a preset pack with someone else's opinions baked in — sounds you can load but never own, because you never built them.

02 · THE RESOLUTION

One voice, five calls, every screw

All five turn out to be one subtractive voice wearing five patches. So BITTERN is one playground: a CALL loads the whole legend — knobs, key, tempo, pattern — and then every screw is exposed: wave, unison, sub, cutoff/peak/env, full ADSR, the pitch DIVE, the LFO wobble, drive, chorus. The reed bed places the notes on scale rails, with slide (the 303's whole secret) and accent. Touch one knob and the call chip lets go — the sound is yours now.

03 · THE REASON

They never stopped sounding awesome

These five always sounded really awesome to me — distinctive, timeless rave sounds that never dated. I always wanted to build them myself, with my own knobs and dials: pick a wave shape, bend it with frequency, attack, decay, sustain, release, point an LFO at it, set the FX, and let the sequencer run. BITTERN is that wish, built: GULAR booming underneath, a bounce that lands the loop straight on a CHIRP deck — where the set begins.

Under the feathers

What the bird can do

GULAR inside — the boom engine: unison oscillators + sub → cascaded lowpass → drive → chorus, one signal path live and offline.
Five calls — ACID, HOOVER, REESE, HARDSTYLE, PSY: whole legends land at once — knobs, key, tempo, and the pattern that defines them.
The playground exception — wave, unison + spread, sub octave, cutoff/peak/env/fall, full ADSR, pitch dive, glide, accent. Sibling SYRINX curates; BITTERN exposes.
The reed bed — 16 reeds; drag one for pitch on scale rails (a wrong note is unrepresentable), click it to rest or sing.
Slide — the 303's secret — tie a step into the next and glide there; a full bar of slides is one droning reese.
The wobble — one LFO docked on cutoff, pitch, or volume; 1–2 Hz on the filter is the DNB nod.
Drive & chorus, the only FX — the screamer and the crowd; they ARE these sounds. The booth adds the space.
Touch it and it's yours — any knob or reed releases the call chip; presets are starting points, not cages.
Seam-folded WAV bounce — loop-perfect, tail folded into the head; drop it in CHIRP's Beats and PERCH finds the grid.
One self-contained file — runs from file://, seven Aviary themes, VOLT — the 2am session — is home. ?selftest=1 proves 13 contracts.

A distinctive sound is a call — you know the bird in one note. These five have carried across thirty years of marsh.

Pick a call. Hit run. Start turning screws.

It's one self-contained HTML file. Nothing to install — and the legends are already dialed in.

1. Open bittern.html 2. Pick a CALL — it's already 1993 3. Drag the reeds, tie the slides 4. Crank DRIVE, bounce → CHIRP