Themes are used to change the colour setup in buzz, i read somwhere that a good tip in one of the old trackers were to change colour setups often for inspiration. Well i can't tell you if it works or not, i can however tell you how to do it.

First of all you need to make sure you've got buzz1.2 BETA or newer, just check the view dropdown menu and you will see if there is an option called themes there. Then you have to make a new folder in your main buzz folder, let's say you've installed it to c:\program\jeskola\buzz then you need to make a c:\program\jeskola\buzz\themes folder.

-Getting your hands on a couple of themes

Here are some themes I've made, just save them in the themes directory, restart buzz and you should be able to choose them from the list in the view dropdown menu. Remember that the default option in the themes menu always will reset buzz to it's original theme, you need no .col file to do this.

newt - army
newt - blues
newt - grayscale
newt - icemint
newt - mellow
newt - serene

When downloading these your browser may decide to use another file extension on them, just make sure they're called .col when you start buzz.

-Making your own themes

This takes some time but is actually quite fun, start by opening a .col file in notepad or a similar editor. Notice the lines of text with two capital letters in the beginning, then a couple of words and after that a 6 digit number.
The first two letters represent a specific part of buzz

MV - machine window
PE - pattern editor
SA - signal analysis
SE - sequence editor

The signal analysis may be a mystery to many, to understand what this is just make a machine, connect it to the master and right click the arrow between them. now you'll see an option called signal analysis, this is a window that let's you show the frequency and amplification of a machines output.

The words following the two letters are the objects you will be changing, the pictures below show the names of most of the objects. The objects not shown are the ones that you should know after having used buzz for a while, like the arrow, generator, effect and such. Note that in most .col files two settings have been forgotten, they are MV Line and MV Machine Border, all my themes however has these objects in the .col file.


The six number digit parameter is the colour value, it is a simple rgb value where digit 1,2 are the red value, 3,4 are the green vlaue and 5,6 is the blue value. Note that all values are in hex, where 0 is black and F is white. A dark red would in other words be 220000, while a light red would be DD0000. To make editing colours easier, try using a graphic program with a colour picker, choose a color, copy the value, paste it to the decided object in your document editor.

To have better control over your editing, try making a .col file, placing it in the buzz folder. Then start buzz and load the theme, everytime you make some changes to the theme just save it and choose it again in buzz to see the results. Remember that making a good theme can take some time, each and every colour in it is very important.

- back to index -

©2000 - newt