I really like this synth. Good job! I don't really understand the theory behind it, though; I don't know what the cosine waveshapers do or what is going on in the big filter section. Do you know anywhere I can read up on some of the theory? I am only just starting to familiarize myself with some basic DSP mathematics. Maybe I just need to spend some time learning basics before I try to comprehend this.

Dkeller, I tried this synth with a midi keyboard, but I also tried it out with your guitar patch. Nice job with the patch; it does a good job of detecting the notes and turning them on and off. The only problem with using a guitar with a patch like this is that the guitar is obviously monophonic while the synth is polyphonic. I guess it would be nice in this situation to have one of those hexaphonic pickups

I agree that the lower partials are a little too quiet. If I play a lower note on the keyboard I can barely hear it but when I start rolling the mod wheel a bit the higher partials come in and they are a lot louder. It sounds great already but it would be nice to hear a bit more of the droning bass sound.

@toxonic said:

is it correct, that i have to use filters and amp envelope for each voice in a synth?

Well, you don't have to, but if your aim is creating a "true" polyphonic synth then the answer is yes. Each voice has it's own envelopes and filters. I'm also working on my main synth (12 voices max) and there's only 1 resonant filter, because I'm afraid 12 vcf's would not be friendly for my cpu But then I find it's ok to have the filter after the actual voices. It would be certainly nice to have each voice have it's own filter but I can live with the limitation.

Dear Anyone who understands virtual MIDI circuitry

I'm a disabled wannabe composer who has to use a notation package and mouse, because I can't physically play a keyboard. I use Quick Score Elite Level 2 - it doesn't have its own forum - and I'm having one HUGE problem with it that's stopping me from mixing - literally! I can see it IS possible to do what I want with it, I just can't get my outputs and virtual circuitry right.

I've got 2 main multi-sound plug-ins I use with QSE. Sampletank 2.5 with Miroslav Orchestra and Proteus VX. Now if I choose a bunch of sounds from one of them, each sound comes up on its own little stave and slider, complete with places to insert plug-in effects (like EQ and stuff.) So far, so pretty.

So you've got - say - 5 sounds. Each one is on its own stave, so any notes you put on that stave get played by that sound. The staves have controllers so you can control the individual sound's velocity/volume/pan/aftertouch etc. They all work fine. There are also a bunch of spare controller numbers. The documentation with QSE doesn't really go into how you use those. It's a great program but its customer relations need sorting - no forum, Canadian guys who wrote it very rarely answer E-mails in a meaningful way, hence me having to ask this here.

Except the sliders don't DO anything! The only one that does anything is the one the main synth. is on. That's the only one that takes any notice of the effects you use. Which means you're putting the SAME effect on the WHOLE SYNTH, not just on one instrument sound you've chosen from it. Yet the slider the main synth is on looks exactly the same as all the other sliders. The other sliders just slide up and down without changing the output sounds in any way. Neither do any effects plugins you put on the individual sliders change any of the sounds in any way. The only time they work is if you put them on the main slider that the whole synth. is sitting on - and then, of course, the effect's applied to ALL the sounds coming out of that synth, not just the single sound you want to alter.

I DO understand that MIDI isn't sounds, it's instructions to make sounds, but if the slider the whole synth is on works, how do you route the instructions to the other sliders so they accept them, too?

Anyone got any idea WHY the sounds aren't obeying the sliders they're sitting on? Oddly enough, single-shot plug-ins DO obey the sliders perfectly. It's just the multi-sound VSTs who's sounds don't individually want to play ball.

Now when you select a VSTi, you get 2 choices - assign to a track or use All Channels. If you assign it to a track, of course only instructions routed to that track will be picked up by the VSTi. BUT - they only go to the one instrument on that VST channel. So you can then apply effects happily to the sound on Channel One. I can't work out how to route the effects for the instrument on Channel 2 to Channel 2 in the VSTi, and so on. Someone told me on another forum that because I've got everything on All Channels, the effects signals are cancelling eachother out, I can't find out anything about this at the moment.

I know, theoretically, if I had one instance of the whole synth and just used one instrument from each instance, that would work. It does. Thing is, with Sampletank I got Miroslav Orchestra and you can't load PART of Miroslav. It's all or nothing. So if I wanted 12 instruments that way, I'd have to have 12 copies of Miroslav in memory and you just don't get enough memory in a 32 bit PC for that.

To round up. What I'm trying to do is set things up so I can send separate effects - EQ etc - to separate virtual instruments from ONE instance of a multi-sound sampler (Proteus VX or Sampletank.) I know it must be possible because the main synth takes the effects OK, it's just routing them to the individual sounds that's thrown me. I know you get one-shot sound VSTi's, but - no offence to any creators here - the sounds usually aint that good from them. Besides, all my best sounds are in Miroslav/Proteus VX and I just wanted to be able to create/mix pieces using those.

I'm a REAL NOOOB with all this so if anyone answers - keep it simple. Please! If anyone needs more info to answer this, just ask me what info you need and I'll look it up on the program.

Yours respectfully

ulrichburke

[bendout] will just take a value between 0-127 and send it to the synth. You'll want to adjust the pitch-bend depth inside the synth itself. If there's a way to run the synth in mono polyphony and legato mode (i.e., not retriggering envelopes when two notes overlap), then you might be able to use your patch as is.

Hello,

I am currently working on a synth for my game controller, this is my first patch and I am very learning the basics.

For the moment the patch is a 8 voices polyphonic synthesizer working with a bunch of phasors. With my controller I have 8 key representing the major scale, the up and down buttons change the octave and right and left rise or lower the note by a semitone. Having this PS2 command, the central joysticks give the possibility to slide between tones a bit like a theremin.

Though i have a few question :

I wanna adopt this little thingy for a midi keyboard with a 16-polyphonic synth.
What is the best way to have polyphonic synth?
Is there a way to have a dispatcher that will send the notes to those synth?

There should be a possibility to pass from [phasor~] to [osc~]. I do not want to surcharge the cpu and wonder if when 0 is send to the frequency of [osc~], does the cup it still use a lot of cpu?

Thanks.

Again, not much activity here because of problems in sysex/midi.
What would be nice here for people building external synth editors is a working
raw midi on all platforms and a set of abstractions to dump, store and examine
sys-ex messages. Have you looked through all of extended/grdiflow/etc and still
not found something to do it?

Manufacturers sysex charts, different for each synth but basically assign controllers to
internal parameters that just arent realtime controller messages, and you fill out the
variable field, usually at least two midi bytes (14 bits) or longer variable length
parts.

They're all published so setting up new synths is no worry. I would actually canibalise the
old sound diver data files I reckon. )

Patco did something with the idea of a "universal synth editor" not too long ago...

IIRC the expander is TWO matrix12's in a box, which is a beast of a synth with hundreds of
parameters... so yikes!, best to start with data in a form that is machine readable that you
can inject your variables into.

> it scares me to use it in case it wipes out all my patches forever!!

Do a sysex dump of your setup and restore it once to feel confident about hacking
the Oberheim via sysex.

Yep... stn, the bot environment is a great immediate, self-contained PD
environment. I really like the examples (tutorial) you provided
with it - great sounds and clear examples.

Apart from sequencing side, I looked a bit into "expandibility" of bot
since I really like the approach
of bot pre-made (and candy colored tools like filters, synths, FX but
this is not really easy: for example
if you want to add a synth to the bot arsenal (hardoff's great juno synth comes to
my head in this moment this is not immediate, nor it is to take a FX out
of bot and use it into other environments (at least you need to make some - mmh, heavy? - mods). So at the end if you want some special features
you may feel a bit "narrow" between bot walls

On the other side I think that if one being used to it, bot *is* one of the much powerful environment I've seen in PD for direct, straigth music composing out-of-the-PD-box. (X Andy: looking into your songs I've the impression
of a slightly different approach: if in bot sequencer is completely separated from
the synth-effect part like a orchestra-score in csound, in your songs the
division is not so "clear", and the sequencing side seems a bit more integrated
with the synth-effect side: am I right? I still need to find my way

So when I first started with PD last year it was a great
discovery like: "wow, this bot is really cool!", which for a PD starter like I was
this helped me a lot in staying inside PD world. So, even if it is not complete,
even if you are not completely satisfied with it ... put it on-line again

I saw that you prepared later last year a tool called "mmm": are you still
developing around it? That was a different approach, and personally I had a
bit more difficulties in understanding it w.r.t. bot...

All the best,

Alberto

You want a low pass to boost bass, for example [lop~ 4000], then increase the gain a bit.

Filter terminology is sometimes confusing. Several terms are used to mean the *same thing*
Attenuate means to reduce or diminish, so a bass boost would be the opposite of attenuating low frequencies. However if we talk about a high pass filter, that's the same *effect* as a low cut filter. Removing highs has the same *effect* as increasing lows and vice versa. Because if you take away some bass and restore the signal to its original volume then you did the equivalent of boosting up some treble.

so, if =~= means "does about the same thing as"

high pass (boosts treble) =~= low cut (attenuates bass)

for that use [hip~]

low pass (boosts bass) =~= high cut (attenuates treble)

for that ise [lop~]

Top and bottom filters are usually taken to be "shelfs", meaning the high pass filter admits signals from its cutoff up to the highest possible frequency, all the way to the top. And conversely a low "shelf" allows through frequencies from its cutoff all the way to zero, all the way to the bottom.

Now, if you add a middle "band", between the top and bottom, it has two sides, what is above it and what is below it. So a "mid cut" is the same as boosting up the bass and treble, and a mid boost is the same as cutting the bass and treble.

for that use [bp~], the band pass

So how do you set the top and bottom limits of the band pass? You don't. Instead you set the middle frequency of the band and the width of the band. An EQ filter shouldn't be resonant, and so the last parameter of [bp~] should be 1

Because it gets a pain in the ass to work out the center frequency and bandwidth of [bp~], [hip~] and [lop~] filters you might like to look at [hml_shelf~], [bpw2~] and some others in iem_lib that are better designed for building EQs

Hello, my name is Martin. I am doing a simple PD patch but I have a lot of doubts and problems with it.
What I need is a simple synth to control ADSR , have 4 presets, simple modulation (AM, FM), and include a free improvise composition.

What I have done is this (Please see my pd patch synth.pd).

What I really want to have is something like this:
http://music.ucsd.edu/~tre/ - a simple 6 voice synth with presets

Anyone can help?

Thank you very much,

Martin.

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/synth.pd