Back in the beginning of the piggy, I’ve setup a loop mode for samples I called oscillator mode. It’s pretty simple: once you got a sample, you know it’s lenght and can adapt the speed at which you scan the sample data so it it tuned to a given note.
It’s got a couple of advantages.
First it means you don’t need to force people to put samples of a given length to be tuned correctly. I’m actually surprised by how little software (i.e. none to my knowledge) does that.
Second, be selecting a rather wide sample, you will skip samples playing hi pitch notes and grab them on low pitched one which gives a different tonal vibes across the keyboard.
Third, by playing with the loop point in the sample, you get some kind of harmonic shift which makes the sound evolve even keeping the same pitch.
A straight forward application of this is to do square wave PWM. If you take a square wave but then reduce the loop length, you will change the cycle duty it the square wave. Since it’s automatically tuned, you don’t have any change in the basic pitch and just get PWM. Easy.
Here’s a little video demonstrating that technique that I’ve implemented in the arduino piano. First a square wave and playing with the loop size, achieving the PWMage, then a bigger NES noise sample that becomes a clear tone if I set the loop small enough.
Enjoy.
PS: Sorry for it sounding a tad shitty but it’s mainly because I’m powering the AP from the usb of my laptop I’m also recording from and there’s a ground loop.
Patric uploaded a couple of vids from our littlegptracker+kaosspads performance for the ONE festival in aalst two weeks ago. It’s kind of all blurrey but the sound athmosphere is quite nice. We’re going to have a split 7″ on emphase records for the festival too.
I got pretty much my filter code for the arduino piano working now. It’s quite tame but I think it’ll work correctly once modulated. I introduced a quick ‘page’ system so I can now toggle the functionality of the pots between different pages allowing access to more than the limiting 3 parameters. It’s not super handy yet but at least it allows for easier tests.
To celebrate the filter, I’d though I’d run the AP through the Box Of Metal and holy fuck, it sounds grungey.
Ok, I know that pretty much anything ran through a distortion sounds good, but still it’s grainy and alive. I like that. Don’t expect anything too musical from this excerpt, it’s more fiddling around trying to find timbres. Get past the boring beginning, this is unedited.
AP+BOM+Dodgey Eighties Ringing Reverb:
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The tone generation is an amazing show dedicated to the early start of synthetiser music. Originally planned to be a 10 show serie, I was very glad to see it was continuing further dropping unexpected candy in my google feed. This last one (12th show) is focusing on RCA synth and contains some voice samples from back in the day that could become instant classic.
The most amazing thing is that all shows are made by Ian Helliwell out of his personal collection of records. I’d like to see that.
Ok, I’m not a huge radiohead fan lately but I got to admit this version of “where i end and you begin” (from the “from the basement serie“) is really nice.
now…
What synth is that guy playing ? It seems like he has a contact strip under the keys (pretty obvious 2:46) and I must say I pretty much dig the idea, controller-wise. The unison of the synth & guitar gives a really nice ghostly feeling.
When developping sound code, there’s nothing more invaluable than a good oscilloscope. Of course, the good ol’ analog one is a beauty to watch, but it’s not exactly handy if you decided for a late night session of coding in bed. I find it’s always been tricky to find a nice software scope but Visual Analyser is quite good and free. God bless italians.
I though at the same time, I’d try to get a screen grab with Debut Video Capture (another freebee) to see how much scope I could post over here. It ran fine on my work machine, now I gotta see how it’s going to perform on my vaio at home.
Small test candy: DS-10 oscillator with LFO ran through V.A. The framerate isn’t the greatest but it will be enough to show some trixes
I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep up. Seriously, there’s so much coming out lately that it’s mind blowing. Already, as I am working on the arduino piano, my Line6 ToneCore developper kit is waiting for me in it’s box - it’s actually more waiting for line6 to publish C-based sample code rather than the pityfull small ASM one -and then, the other day, Jay pointed me to the beagleboard.
The beagleboard is based on the same chipset as the Pandora (it seems the pando developper use it as pre-dev board). It’s void of any screen but’s got plenty of horsepower, nice enough connectivity (audio in/out, usb) and it’s size could easily be retrofitted in an old oxygen or someting. Definetly one to watch for a polyphonic synth board !
A nice little feature of audition I wasn’t aware of and very useful when trying to grab one oscillator cycle from a waveform. Grab a selection a tad bigger than the cycle then go to Edit>Zero-Crossings>Adjust Selection Inwards (or Shift+I). Then Ctrl+T to trim, and export.
There was a great post today at audio cookbook about room reverb feedback. Basically recording a click in a room, playback it back in the same room, re-record it and so on. In the end, the original sound is becoming a big smear and the successful iteration are pretty mesmerizing:
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Since I don’t have a room nor the proper equipment, I thought I’d just give a try doing it by using VSTs and a feedback loop in ableton live. Here’s what I got:
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Pretty nice although nowhere close to the beauty of the original. Of course, it will depends immensly of the type of reverb used (this is just a simple plate) and ultimately I wonder what it’d give using impulse response based reverbs like altiverb.
Since I’m writing the filter code for the arduino, I thought it’d be nice to listen to some sound examples posted on the page.
Holy fuck
That sounds good !
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Of course, this is a full analog effect with not only filtering but preamp overdrive, distortion and all that jazz, but since I was looking to some reference to calibrate my own code against, I’ll think I rip one wave cycle from that casio, stuff it in the arduino and use it just for comparison with what I got.
The tone generation is an amazing show dedicated to the early start of synthetiser music. Originally planned to be a 10 show serie, I was very glad to see it was continuing further dropping unexpected candy in my google feed. 
