New music up on bandcamp!
A slow-evolving, minimalist piece for modular synthesizer.
“Hard Sync” Oscillators in Reaktor 6 Primary
Creating retro sounds with hard-synced oscillators in Reaktor 6 Primary.
“Hard sync” is synthesis technique that uses two oscillators: when one oscillator (the “leader”) finishes a cycle, it resets the period of the other oscillator (the “follower”), creating a period at the frequency of the leader, but a timbre from the incomplete cycles of the follower.
This is a really easy way to create original, complex sounds, using just two oscillators.
I say “1980s”, here but check out this sound in the Cars 1979 hit, “Let’s Go” (played on a Prophet-5 Synthesizer).
0:00 Defining “Hard Sync”
0:38 Building a Single Oscillator
1:35 Adding the “Follower”
3:03 Changing the Pitch Relationship
4:40 That Hard Sync Sound
4:57 How it Works
6:30 Follower Lower than Leader
7:25 Adding an Amplitude Envelope
8:10 Adding a Filter (for a bit)
9:28 Closing, Next Steps
Reaktor 6 Beginner Tutorials here:
Ihatov MU (無) : Noise Music at the Hanamaki “English Coast”
Screaming noise improvisation on 54HP Eurorack at the peaceful Hanamaki “English Coast” (花巻イギリス海岸).
There’s a feedback loop going here with spring reverb and ring modulation, plus quite a bit of contribution from the After Later Audio Benjolin V2.
More “MU” on the Hanamaki English Coast:
Pd Patch from Scratch: Filter Pinging
Doing some filter “pinging” use the resonant [bob~] filter in Pd Vanilla.
Filter pinging is a synthesis technique where you sent a “pop” (i.e. an audible click) to a resonant filter to create a percussive plucking sound around that filter’s cutoff frequency. Since we’re in Pd Vanilla, the easiest way to get a resonant filter is with [bob~], the “Runge-Kutte numerical simulation of the Moog analog resonant filter.”
There’s no talking on this one, just building the patch, and listening to it go.
0:00 Setting up the filter
0:40 Filtering a sawtooth wave
1:35 Subaudio [phasor~]
2:04 Randomizing cutoff frequency each ping
3:33 Commenting the code
5:12 Oops
Pure Data introductory tutorials here: