Valoa kansalle

I had to throw away my old synth, for various reasons. Well, I didn't really throw it away, but it will take ages to make anything sort of a product, 'cos certain things weren't really done the way you would want to do them in a reliable software synthesizer.

The good news though is that for past half a year or so, I've been working on a new codebase, and somewhat different concept. The new synth thingie I call 'Valo' and while it's nowhere near finished, it's got to the point where most things work (well, there's no PWM yet and modwheel/aftertouch/velocity support is missing, and MIDI side lacks quite a few things and...) and it makes sound.

At present it has a completely redesigned oscillators, new filter design (well, if you can call a ladder low-pass new anymore these days) and it does all kinds of fancy stuff like mm.. sawtooth and square waves (well actually triangle as well) and it can do stuff like oscillator sync (properly) and the signal path is so non-linear it's a pain to tune everything 'cos when the signal levels change in one place, everything behind it has to be retuned with proper levels again.. which fortunately is not that many things.

I can't say it sounds clean. With all the non-linearities causing intermodulation distortions and noise here and there making everything slightly unstable, it most certainly does not sound very clean. On the bright side, it can sound approximately as clean as your average analog synth.

Yup, there's sample. Thought you'd like one. Some external effects (Kjaerhus Classic-series Chorus/Delay/Reverb) with pretty simple settings to make it sound less dry as the synth itself doesn't have any add-on effects (I'm not a huge fan of those) and currently only ever outputs mono-signal (that might change I think).

The patch itself is a "little of everything" thing with almost everything in the synth in use, including oscillators in synced mode, pitch envelope driving the slave, some (per-voice) distortion to trash it after filter, and finally both LFOs messing with the signal. No manual knob tweaking done. I'm sure you can tell I'm a very good sound designer.

Draw a picture

It's still somewhat of a sketch, but no idea if I'm ever going to develop it futher. Coloring was done really quick (probably about 5 minutes total) so the shading is off in a lot of places, I know.

Winterbells?

Maybe I've played this a bit too much...

Audio from some recent code

While I generally liked how my old code sounded, my last iteration of a sound engine had couple of problems. It wasn't nearly as "fat" sounding as I'd hoped, with a bit of too much noise. It'd still sound fine for lower sounds, but the high-end was never quite clear, and both the filter and the oscillators were quite dark and not very aggressive.

Well, I'll be throwing those oscillators away. The filter I might eventually fix. But I've been working with some new oscillators and a new filter, and this sample demonstrates what three triangle waves and a lowpass filter can sound. This is pure virtual analog, no wavetables or anything like that, everything is calculated realtime. Unfortunately, it IS quite heavy on the CPU as of now, so I'll have to see how to optimize it. Eventually that'll happen.

Oh, and I apologize that mp3-compression is somewhat audible.

Changes

Things change fast these days. I actually did get some more filter stuff prototyped, thought it wasn't quite up to the job, read some, fixed some, realized I need better oversampling filters, read some more, banged my head to the wall, and mm.. got the whole thing together, and it sounds okayish. I won't be posting sample at this time (that will have to wait), but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

On signal processing front, I'm now trying to figure out how to do hard-clipping without aliasing or huge amounts of oversampling. It turns out that some of the most fun sounds one can get from clipping is with rather loud partials in the high-mid frequency range, and if the sound is otherwise even "cleanish" one can only have tiny amounts of clipping before it starts sounding awful. Anyway, I have an approach in mind, though I won't be giving any details, since it's kinda high-tech stuff, and I wouldn't want somebody else to steal it, yet. ;)

Anyway, that brings us to another thing, which is that things might stall here again, at least on the signal processing front, if not on the music front. I'll try to keep the music alive even if the development stalls, but it kinda seems I might have some new things taking my time in the near future. We'll see. But what I can tell at this point, it does mean I won't be releasing a full-blown synth anytime soon like the plan kinda was. That'll have to wait for now. Depending on things, I might be splitting some of my work into smaller modules, and release those, but suffice to say, I don't have much pressure for it now.

Anyway, I'm still a happy man. Actually happier. I'm kinda feeling like I was 20 again, so much is happening right now, with things rolling in the right directions. Now all that is missing is finding a nice little girl yelling at me for spending the week in front of the screen and the weekend in a bar.

No honestly, I ain't an alcoholic or anything, even if during the last two weeks I've managed to have two hangovers. Neither was that bad though, more like those I had when I was around ... mm.. 20? Haha.

What's going on?

Not much eh?

Well, stuff is going on, even if I've not posted much. I've been doing a couple of things, none of which have been very inspiring from the blogging point of view.

First of all, I've been working and spending time with friends quite a bit, which has been quite refreshing. It seemed certain stuff was very stalled, but now there's more going on around here again, and I'm enjoying all kinds of new experiences I've stumbled across. Could even say, I'm kinda regaining my interest in the so-called "real life" which is probably healthy.

Then there's being going on lots of making of music. Not much to release yet, I think. I'm thinking of building a larger set of material together first, then releasing some sort of EP maybe.. I don't know. But I'm also learning a lot of new stuff with music, things I've not really even been interested before, which is lots of fun, but the results aren't really that great yet, so it'll take a while before anyone else gets to enjoy. Maybe I'll talk about that in some later post, so we'll get a bit less inactivity here.

Then there's been some writing of code. Not much has resulted from that yet, since it's largely been of the research variety. I'm finally quite happy (that's probably an understatement) with my basic model of a saw-core analog oscillator, and I'm looking forward to prototype some wave-shaping to derive triangle and sine from that core in a somewhat similar way that a real analog oscillator module would do. I have the theory laid out already, so it's really just a matter of finishing some math and writing some code at this point. Then I've been doing some more extensive research with filters, unfortunately not quite as much as I'd liked to, though. Got some theory to prototype on that front as well.

Oh and then there's some other stuff, and plans that get delayed, and whatever. Hopefully things will advance in the near future again.

Green Ray of Light - Poisoned Breakfast

Well, actually got another tune made as well.. a real quickie again, but well, possibly a bit more to the point than the previous one. Hopefully I'll find the time to do something really thought out stuff as well again soon..

As usual, http://www.mikseri.net/grol.