Recently I've been thinking about deconstructing a ThinkPad and putting the internals inside a MIDI controller. We're at the stage where VSTs/DAWs easily sound better than any synthesizer with internal sounds. But, it's a huge pain to carry a laptop and a sound card to a gig. When will someone address this?
Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths
31–40 of 99 posts
Re: Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths
#32I was interested in the Zynthian kit, but it's unavailable in the US right now due to Trump.
Re: Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they are not the same, if you are a musician going to bars and practice spaces and the like that $300 Blofeld will handle the abuse and accidents much better than a laptop or tablet. No matter what you do and how careful you are, cords get snagged and stepped on, stuff gets knocked over, things get spilled etc etc etc. My Blofeld has taken far more abuse than any laptop or tablet will handle and still going stron…
> My Blofeld has taken far more abuse than any laptop or tablet will handle and still going strong 15 years later; three laptops and two tablets later. On the other hand, my Blofeld had wonky unresponsive knobs after just a couple of months, not that they were very good at the first place, who thought having knobs with no tactile feeling of grip was good idea?! Personally the biggest win for actual hardware is that i…
The encoder issue was fixed with a firmware update, they switched encoders and did not quite account for how they would work once broken in. I had one of those Blofelds for awhile, bought a second because the deal was too good to pass up and it was pretty much new in box. I like the knobs, love the detentless encoders.
Re: Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths
#34I discovered by pure chance the vast ecosystem of iOS synths apps. And I was absolutely blown away. 90+% of the synths of the past century are available for ~5-20€ each. Connect that to a basic KORG MicroKeys Air [extra cheap, but includes Bluetooth]. And you are the next Jean-Michel Jarre. [Note: and the amount of tutorial videos on YouTube is huge.]
Creating music was never more accessible than it is now. Conversely, the likelihood of making it big just by making some good damn music was never lower than it is now. Makes for a fine hobby though.
How will that hobby fare against gen-AI prompt composing? Synths and samplers and sequencers were once removed from playing real instruments, softsynths and DAW twice removed and now there's genAI, thrice removed and arguably the biggest jump of them all. When softsyths appeared, real instruments weren't affected at all, but physical synths all but disappeared, just carried on by inertia, integration with real instruments and a bit of nostalgia. Will the same happen to soft synth now that there's an alternative thrice removed from real instruments?
I believe so: in an aging softsynth community I still mingle with occasionally, everybody who is still actively involved with music seems to have either moved on to genAI, or to soft-on-Rpi for better integration with real instruments (including synths of all kinds).
Re: Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths
#35I wrote a software synth myself with the intention of running it on Raspbery Pi 3 / Zero 2. Those are actually quite capable processers; sound synthesis requires very little RAM, both code and for maintaining state, so everything fits in the rather tiny cache. But at the same time, while these Pis use "little" cores, the maximum throughput of NEON instructions is actually the same as for the corresponding "big" cores…
To put this into perspective, five FMAs per sample is enough to implement a biquad filter. This is a very common DSP building block that can implement an idealized version of any of the 2nd-order filters that were ubiquitous in analog synths, e.g. high pass/low pass/band pass/notch/all pass. See the famous Audio EQ Cookbook for examples:
https://www.w3.org/TR/audio-eq-cookbook/
By chaining various combinations of EQ and non-linear distortion (lots of ways to implement this, probably involving more FMAs) and you can build very good simulations of common analog synth signal paths.
Note that gsliepen's example sample rate of 96 kHz is perfectly reasonable in this context; it's more than you need to exceed the limits of human hearing, but it's common to oversample your signal for processing to avoid problems with aliasing.
Re: Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths
#36I discovered by pure chance the vast ecosystem of iOS synths apps. And I was absolutely blown away. 90+% of the synths of the past century are available for ~5-20€ each. Connect that to a basic KORG MicroKeys Air [extra cheap, but includes Bluetooth]. And you are the next Jean-Michel Jarre. [Note: and the amount of tutorial videos on YouTube is huge.]
Yes! But, huge but, very huge but, you lose the affordance of the switches and the buttons and the knobs and the patch cables. And that is a terrible loss for fiddling and discovery.
Midi controllers work plenty good with ipads
Re: Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arturia does that, and Korg did as well (making controller keyboards specific for emulating a synth, with the software running on a Mac or PC. Downsides: - if the software doesn’t get updated, you’re stuck running an old OS an old Mac that supports it. - you can’t just turn on the synth and use it, you need to find a cable, connect it to the Mac, launch the software, etc
What I don't quite get is why manufacturers of midi controllers (Arturia, Novation, NI, etc.), with the exception of, possibly only Korg, don't release any of their digital instruments as mobile apps. After sitting the whole day in front of my computer, the last thing I want to do is to swap VS Code for Ableton or Kontakt and spend a few more hours in the glow of my monitors. (I do get that if you are very serious ab…
Both Novation and Arturia have some stuff for iPad?
Re: Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arturia does that, and Korg did as well (making controller keyboards specific for emulating a synth, with the software running on a Mac or PC. Downsides: - if the software doesn’t get updated, you’re stuck running an old OS an old Mac that supports it. - you can’t just turn on the synth and use it, you need to find a cable, connect it to the Mac, launch the software, etc
What I don't quite get is why manufacturers of midi controllers (Arturia, Novation, NI, etc.), with the exception of, possibly only Korg, don't release any of their digital instruments as mobile apps. After sitting the whole day in front of my computer, the last thing I want to do is to swap VS Code for Ableton or Kontakt and spend a few more hours in the glow of my monitors. (I do get that if you are very serious ab…
This is why I bought a teenage engineering op-1. Yes it’s overpriced, yes there are definitely better little desktop synths but I can whip this one out and just go wild without having to look at a (real) screen.
Same reason I keep my Roland Fantom around - has everything built in to the device.
Re: Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths
#39What is the point of making hardware synths on a Pi when you could just make a VST?
Re: Raspberry Pi Synthesizers – How the Pi is transforming synths
#40What is the point of making hardware synths on a Pi when you could just make a VST?
I can't tell if this is sarcasm.