While many of Alchemy’s features are new, others are inherited from Camel Audio’s Cameleon 5000 synthesizer. This gives Alchemy the ability to replicate the capabilities of its older sibling. If you are coming to Alchemy from Cameleon, this page will help you understand how key features in the two instruments correspond.

• Voices A–D in Cameleon correspond to Sources A–D in Alchemy.
• The Harmonic component of a Cameleon voice is equivalent to the Additive element of an Alchemy source.
• The Noise component of a Cameleon voice is equivalent to the Spectral element of an Alchemy source. (More specifically, set the Spectral element to NOISE-RESYNTH mode.)

• While voices in Cameleon are invariably combined by morphing, Alchemy offers both crossfading and morphing capabilities. The difference between a crossfade and a morph is discussed on the Morph page of this manual. To replicate Cameleon’s behavior, stick with morphing.
• While the ‘Morph Square’ is a fixed part of the Cameleon interface, Alchemy offers two assignable XY Pads in its Perform section that can be configured to control morphing. For details, see Where did the ‘Morph Square’ go? and Basic additive and spectral morphing on the Morph page of this manual.
• Similarly, Alchemy can be configured to replicate Cameleon’s Amplitude, Harmonics, and Noise morph modes (see Morphing different aspects of the sound) and its Morph Timeline (see MSEG-driven morphs).

• Increasing Harmonize in a Cameleon voice (‘Harm’ knob in the Harmonics section) is equivalent to decreasing Pitch Variation in an Alchemy source (‘PVar’ knob on the ADDITIVE subpage).

• The Formant Filter on Cameleon’s Effects page corresponds to the Formant ModMap feature in each Alchemy source, found in the Amp menu on the ADDITIVE subpage. For details, see Using the Additive Formant Filter. Note that when Alchemy is morphing (rather than crossfading) sources, the Amp menu selection for Source A applies to all four sources.
• The multi-mode Filter on Cameleon’s Effects page is applied separately to each polyphonic voice; then the voices are mixed and the result is passed through the remaining effects blocks (Distortion, Chorus, Stereo Delay, Reverb). To reproduce this scheme faithfully in Alchemy, use one of the main Filters — in one of the six ‘BQ’ or ‘Fat’ modes listed at the top of the filter type menu — and use the same effects blocks in the same order as you would in Cameleon. However, there is a much larger range of filtering and effects processing possibilities to be explored in Alchemy; see the Filter and Effects pages of this manual for details.

• Both Cameleon and Alchemy provide a RANDOM button in their title bars, to intelligently generate new random presets. More localized randomization is available in certain Cameleon modules (via a distinctive ‘Camel’ button) and in many Alchemy modules (via a ‘Randomize’ command in the Source content menus and various FILE menus).

Preset types and terminology

Both Cameleon and Alchemy allow you to load and save whole presets (instrument settings) as well as a variety of smaller component settings. The table below lists these from large to small, showing correspondences between the preset types of the two instruments.

NOTE. .c5i files that originated in Cameleon can be translated into Alchemy presets (.acp files) via the FILE > Load command described on the Title bar page of this manual.