41–50 of 77 posts
Why is it called subtracrive when the signals are added or multiplied?
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This winter I went down this rabbit hole and back up, trying to approximate some acoustic instrument sounds. I went through a succession of different workflows, spending a couple weeks on each. Workflow 1: feed a sawtooth oscillator through filters controllable with knobs. Eventually I realized that it will always sound mechanical, no matter how many filters you stack. That led to Workflow 2: feed a sawtooth oscillat…
> The whole experience made me suspect that there's an alternative approach to building modular synths, based on physical facts about sound Yamaha experimented with this in the 90s with their VL series physical modeling synths, but it never caught on, mostly I think because if you want to have convincing results, you really need alternative midi controllers like a breath controller[1] for woodwind and brass intrument…
(It helps that some of my favorite producers and composers have used Pianoteq - for me that's Guy Sigsworth and Thomas G:Son, but the Ludovico Einaudi endorsement really clinches it for me.)
I’d highly recommend getting comfortable programming a subtractive synth to anyone interested in making music, particularly electronic music. I’ve been fooling around with music for about 20 years, but the path I took (trackers, which are sample based, then into VSTs with their huge preset libraries) plus a lack of self-discipline meant that I never really mastered making a sound from scratch on a synth. It’s only in…
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FM is hard. Let the machines do the work. :) https://www.factmag.com/2017/07/14/watch-aphex-twin-midimuta...
Midimutant is an evolutionary resynthesis system. These have been around for about a quarter century but I think they've not proven very helpful. There is another way to let the machines do the work: interactive evolution. Brian Eno thought of this in 1995 (among others): the system presents you with N candidate patches, you select the ones you like, and it uses your selections to think of N new patches to offer you.…
EDIT: Great work, adding your paper to my stack of read-todo's...
I got this from Brian Eno's Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/dark_shark/status/1122355076360572928
Imagine for a moment I'm a recommendation engine. People who liked Brian Eno's twitter feed also liked... Have you seen Reactable? http://reactable.com/
I wish there were one like that. If only we had some companies with big silos of our data, ML tech and server capacities.
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> The whole experience made me suspect that there's an alternative approach to building modular synths, based on physical facts about sound Yamaha experimented with this in the 90s with their VL series physical modeling synths, but it never caught on, mostly I think because if you want to have convincing results, you really need alternative midi controllers like a breath controller[1] for woodwind and brass intrument…
I feel if you're going to such lengths to approximate physical instruments..maybe just record physical instruments? Synths can do things that are unable to be done physically, so why not use them to that end? Although, I understand sometimes it's an aesthetic choice, having a poorly-approximated physical sound.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This winter I went down this rabbit hole and back up, trying to approximate some acoustic instrument sounds. I went through a succession of different workflows, spending a couple weeks on each. Workflow 1: feed a sawtooth oscillator through filters controllable with knobs. Eventually I realized that it will always sound mechanical, no matter how many filters you stack. That led to Workflow 2: feed a sawtooth oscillat…
FM synthesis can generate a very broad array of sounds. A lot of the time you get bad results but if you’re looking for something that can make all kinds of different sounds that’s one option. There are actually so many synthesis techniques, you should download some software synths and take a listen. Really fun stuff
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The whole experience made me suspect that there's an alternative approach to building modular synths, based on physical facts about sound Yamaha experimented with this in the 90s with their VL series physical modeling synths, but it never caught on, mostly I think because if you want to have convincing results, you really need alternative midi controllers like a breath controller[1] for woodwind and brass intrument…
I feel if you're going to such lengths to approximate physical instruments..maybe just record physical instruments? Synths can do things that are unable to be done physically, so why not use them to that end? Although, I understand sometimes it's an aesthetic choice, having a poorly-approximated physical sound.
I'd much rather be able to just plug MIDI into a plug-in to get say a saxophone line for a song than having to buy a top tier saxophone, learn to play it in a perfectly soundproofed room with great microphone, DAC, ect.
Why is it called subtracrive when the signals are added or multiplied?
The sound making starts with creating “all” the spectral content (e.g a saw or square wave is a sum of infinitely many sine waves, up to the nyquist limit) and then the synth uses a filter to subtract some frequencies - typically all frequencies above a certain cutoff. So the term subtractive comes from the fact that it first makes a lot of spectral content, then removes some of it.
I’d highly recommend getting comfortable programming a subtractive synth to anyone interested in making music, particularly electronic music. I’ve been fooling around with music for about 20 years, but the path I took (trackers, which are sample based, then into VSTs with their huge preset libraries) plus a lack of self-discipline meant that I never really mastered making a sound from scratch on a synth. It’s only in…
Would you say that it's a good first project for learning programming from the beginning as well or would other (easier) projects be more suited for this task?
A good comparison would be some visual programming environments and modular buzz-machine type DAW programms, that both look very similar, employing the graph metaphor--nets of generators and filters. I'm not sure wgether that's comparable to functional reactive programming, that I have never tried.
Writing a synth in C would be very different, at any rate, I guess, something I don't even know how to go about in an ergonomic fashion.