Drone Control is a set of three PureData patches that make it easy to play very
long notes.

Some synthesizers provide a latch or audition button that holds the current note
while you listen and tweak your patch. Not all synthesizers provide latch
functionality. The obvious DAW solution of creating a 100-bar long note works
nicely until you want to start in the middle of that note.

Screenshots.

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/Drone_Control_v1.zip

@nine09 said:

If the volume knob of the modulators are set to 0, the modulator signal will not be added to the output but will modify the carrier. So I guess it's kind of a hybrid FM/additive synthesiser haha.

I might make some improvements to it when I got time

Ok that makes sense. I really just gave the patch a cursory overview. I'll have to dive in deeper over the weekend. No need to try to make it an "orthodox" FM synth - whatever that means. You've got a great thing going on here, I'm just trying to better understand it and learn from what you've done. Definitely inspiring!

This is a very impressive synth you've put together!

A few things though:
1. "pure data synthesizer" isn't a very good name. Even "Fasil's Awesome Synth" would be better
2. The Randomizer is great. It might be nice to be able to modify how much each parameter gets randomized
3. I don't see anything about FM algorithms. I assume that all of the modulators are modifying the carrier? On closer inspection, the carrier and modulators are just being multiplied together. Isn't this just a big ringmod synth?
4. Have you considered replacing your many subpatches with abstractions? It would be easier to study and reuse components if they were abstractions rather than subpatches.

Again, great work. Your synth looks and sounds wonderful!

Glad to hear it was useful for you. I just used it to tune the filter on my Shruthi-1 kit.

I found the bug in my patch and replaced "Cave of Creation.zip" with the fixed "Cave of Creation 1.1.zip" in my previous post. Enjoy!

After talking with hamster via email, I've made a few updates to his patch and have given it the name he originally intended: "Cave of Creation."

I'm not sure why, but it seems to eat up a lot of CPU time until you turn it on with the on_off button at the bottom of the patch. ** Update ** Changing all references to "scale" to "$0-scale" seems to have fixed this, though there is only one instance of the scale table.

I've added boolean switches for each of the individual water drop synths as well as the left and right pad synths. I have also added a number of scales as well as a scale randomizer.

Per domien's request, I've uploaded a recording to SoundCloud:

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/Cave_of_Creation_1.1.zip

Linux may help, but my guess is that the Atom CPU is at fault here. All of the other machines discussed here have dual core CPUs with substantial caches.

I've been running this patch on Pd-Extended 0.42.5 on a Core2 Duo MacBook Pro with no trouble at all.

It is interesting to see that the Eee can't handle a patch like this - I've been thinking of getting a netbook for this sort of thing.

Great work, hamster!

Like lead, I've been playing this patch for over an hour and continue to be impressed. Along the way, I printed everything out and have been analyzing your meditation generator.

I'm not done yet, but the following may help others get started with their own analysis:

Starting with main.pd and working your way down:
1. main.pd can be broken down into three major sections. The top section consists of everything between [metro 5000] and [snapshot~] / [route ...]. The middle section is the row of ten identical structures that each start with a [stream~ ...] and end with a pair of [throw~ ...] objects. Finally, there is everything below those ten structures.

2. The top section produces LFO modulated envelopes on the left and ten-note sets on the right. This data is passed down to the middle and bottom sections.

3. The middle section is a row of ten similar synthesizers. Each synth gets its initialization from the top section. The meat of the synthesis is in [stream~]. As far as I can tell, it is very carefully filtered noise. The output of [stream~] is sent to a tuned bandpass filter, and then panned slowly from left to right.

4. The bottom section has four significant subsections: The mixer/processor is at the top left and the pad generator is on the right. Below these two sections is a pair of custom reverb units. At the very bottom is the [master] output and recording section.

5. I don't fully understand what is going on in the mixer/processor, though it appears that the left and right channels each get bandpass filters (by stacking a pair of [hip] on top of a pair of [lop]) and are randomly assigned independent control envelopes.

6. The pad synth on the right sounds like white noise, but is built around a trio of [osc~] units. Ironically, the ten identical synths in the middle section are built around [noise~] but don't sound like noise!

7. The custom reverbs are defined in [freezeverb]. It seems to be built on a total of 28 300ms delays. I don't understand how it works, but the layout is very nice to look at!

8. Finally, the output and record sections at the bottom seem fairly obvious.