Pure Data Vanilla Builds

Here are basic builds of each synth on this page wrapped in a Pure Data patch with all controls and initial values exposed. Should be handy if you want to port these to your setup or just use them in pd.

Ringdown

This is a brand new synthesis method!

When two sine waves are ring modulated together, the result is two tones whose frequencies are equal to the sum and difference of the input frequencies.

This synth places a carrier oscillator at an arbitrary frequency high above the notes that you play. Each voice is generated by ring modulating this oscillator by a sine wave whose frequency is halfway between the carrier frequency and the intended fundamental. The resulting tone is filtered to dampen frequencies generated above the fundamental.

The artifacts generated while sweeping the frequency of the carrier are amusing and sometimes lovely.

Download it here:

Ed Myrol

Many digital synthesizers attempt to mimic analog systems while avoiding aliasing artifacts typical to basic digital interpretations of analog waveforms.

Ed Myrol avoids certain artifacts by producing only frequencies that are an exact number of audio samples long. This limitation produces notes that are not necessarily in tune. To bring the pitches back into line, each voice has a rudimentary delay-based pitch shifter.

This is a very silly way to avoid aliasing. It is CPU Intensive. Depending on the phase of the pitch shifter, the onset of notes can be delayed. The pitch shifters generate glitches and artifacts of their own, the intensity of which vary across the range of notes. The payoff for being patient with these issues is an unusual character of sound.

We’re used to the ugly artifacts of pitch shifters processing polyphonic material. It turns out that using a separate shifter to process each voice results in complementary and interesting artifacts. The character changes depending on the degree of shift. It’s interesting to set the pitch shift to an arbitrary value and compensate by transposing the midi input. Pitch modulation such as vibrato must target the shifters and so alters the character of the artifacts in time.

Consider Ed Myrol a bizarre alternative to virtual analog synthesis using oversampling or bandlimited oscillators.

Download it here:

Pianofax

Piano patches programmed for early digital samplers are often satisfying to play and hear. Some quality that those patches possessed was usually lost as piano emulations became more sophisticated. Pianofax is a low-fidelity piano sample playback instrument seeking this aura.

The samples are fed into basic digital resonators that emulate, after a fashion, the sympathetic resonance of an acoustic piano. This instrument tracks sustain pedal MIDI messages. If you don’t have a pedal, use the ‘Manual Sustain’ switch in the GUI.

Download it here:

PMer

PMer is a three-operator FM synthesizer that allows feedback across the entire network of operators. Instead of using more operators all feeding forward, folding a small FM network into itself generates a lot of complex FM all at once.

Download it here:

Impulse Control

Impulse control uses a sort of flanger system as a paraphonic filter. The flanger tone can be altered with standard modulations or follow trends in the MIDI input stream.

Download it here: