Something to keep Spogg busy during self-isolation

[Spogg]

OMG!!

Martin, you never cease to amaze me. The sounds from padOsc3 are really beautiful.
Not only that but you did this so quickly and in ASM.

I assume the partial arrays set which partials are sounding. Do the values have to be 1 or 0 or can they be intermediate values?

Totally wonderful.

Spogg

[martinvicanek]

Thanks guys!

@Adam, you are absolutely right about aliasing. I figured if the partials fall off then for pad sounds aliasing will not be so much of a problem. But using one wavetable for the entire range is certainly stretching it too far. Bear with me, remedy is coming!

@Spogg, the partial strengths can be any number, not just 0 or 1. The examples were just quickly put together. Feel free to create your own arrays! For the time being the number of partials is limited to 64 but that will change. I plan to add touch sensitivity, too.

Off to more explorations.

[adamszabo]

Can one also do a normal saw or square sound, or it requires too many partials? Right now the "string" sounds like a triangle. I also noticed that when the detune is 0, and you keep holding a key for long enough, it creates this very slight pitch jump (at least it sounds like that) every 2 second or so. Should it be like that?

[pshannon]

Martin, "Exploring"? I couldn't believe what I heard. You are clearly on the right path and please keep going. Thanks for sharing and the efforts you put into it. You clearly know ASM very well and you are in my mind the Charles Xavier (Professor X) here. Over the short time in this blog, I have come to learn of the many diverse talents. I bet if several people on this blog came together with all these talents, the team could make one amazing synth beyond just vst tools or ideas.

[martinvicanek]

@Adam, Thanks for your sharp observation about the pitch! I can confirm it is there - clearly a bug which I need to fix. A saw or square can be synthesized with this scheme, and it will be available in a forthcoming post.

@pshannon: I agree, we have many extraordinary talents here! I am happy to share my schematics and receive valuable comments in return.

[BobF]

Hi Martin,

This is fantastic, I can not wait to see what comes next. This has so much promise for so much more. This is the kind of stuff that keeps me awake at night dreaming of this stuff and knowing I don't know enough to actually do it.. I was attempting something like this with my Sine generator, but no way would it ever work like this. Super stuff!

Later then, BobF.....

[kortezzzz]

Pure beauty, Martin. Thanks for sharing. You definitely break some stiff boundaries of what can be achieved by this platform. Never thought that FS made synth can sound like that or do such stuff. I'm looking forward to see any future progress.

[tulamide]

Here's my contribution.

I added a very basic early partials editor to PadOSC3. Currently the implementation is as follows: switch the OSC to "Freeform", then click and drag on the partials view to draw your partials. When satisfied, click on the refresh icon in the upper right.

It's so basic that it doesn't even support saving with presets or at least exporting/importing. But I wanted to get it out, for the feedback and to see, if Martin intended a totally different appraoch, in which case I don't need to go on with it.

Nevertheless, have fun with it!

@Martin
I'm under the impression, that only the first 8 or so partials really contribute to the sound. The array I create does provide 64 partials though. Would you mind having a look what's going on there?

[Spogg]

That’s brilliant tulamide; I had a similar idea. No, really!

I found it a pain to have to press the Refresh button all the time so I added an auto refresh function so it updates when you release the mouse. That way you can draw the shape and hear the result faster. I didn’t want to mess with your Ruby code so I kept it simple.

Cheers

Spogg

[martinvicanek]

Excellent! Many thanks, Tulamide!

I was actually planning to implement something like a Harmonic Designer tab where the user can create his or her own preferred partials distribution in addition to a number of canned presets. In addition to individual intensities for each partial, it will be possible to control anharmonicity to the degree of completely random frequencies (cymbal synthesis ). Since this involves up to 512 partials for the lowest notes, I had thought of alternatives to moving each partial individually, i.e. controls for certain characteristic parameters like anharmonicity, zero all even partials, high end fall-of etc. There will be a lot of GUI work, especially for displaying the settings result in both the frequency and the time domain with lin/log, zoom, shift, labels, etc.

You know that my focus is rather on DSP while I tend to neglect aspects of good design and usability, the latter being far more important for a sucessful product than the former. So I'll be grateful for any help in that area!

Meanwhile I have fixed the bug reported by Adam (among other things). Many than ks again!