A couple of experiments merged together, and became this thing.
Using a VCF to attenuate sound instead of a VCA (i think Sound on Sound talked about this once?)
Using an LFO for a vibrato, but that got boring so it controls a tremolo now
And a crossfader introduces the tremolo with a second envelope so it stays clear of the attack (learned this one trying to make flutes in zynaddsub once)
Trying to stack a second oscillator pitches below the first didn’t sound so great, but offsetting the pulse width and stacking the same tone that way sounded neat
The de-tuner goes before the oscillator, not after it
Piping audio in to the Resonator seems to excite the strings like they were plucked, but if you exceed the built-in 6x polyphony it doesn’t stunt one of the strings and re-pluck it, it just changes the pitch of an already-moving string?
Resonating a mini supersaw (it’s only 3, not 7) sounds neat.
I guess the trick with dampen is not to set it so the resonator is “reverb-y.” I suppose it should only be trusted to do a very slight effect to signals and then entrust a reverb to carry the rest of the sound.
Trying to immitate Sound on Sound’s discussion about guitar noises from saw waves and distortion filters. While I didn’t succeed in the slightest at making a guitar it still sounds pretty neat.
There are some minor crackles and pops. Putting the distortion in seems to have gone beyond what I can do with ALSA on the bigger rig (although, running it over JACK doesn’t fizzle and pop. No idea.)
I’m also still not too sure how to create rhythms on impromptu sequencers. I think you’re meant to do it by setting the clock divider and altering the gates for each note, which is a little burdensome. Maybe that’s an idea for a separate post?
I was listening to a myNoise preset and discovered the existence of the Shruti Box. While myNoise allows a drone with ~10 notes at once (which sounds quite full, especially when modulated) the synthesized version here can get to about two before performance degrades and the audio becomes unlistenable.
Things of note:
Impromptu TACTs are being used as a slew limiter here. It receives signals and slowly moves the volume of the drone towards one of the extremes.
Bernoulli gates are used to drive TACT. It looks like they may still have an incomplete implementation so the cool switching modes can’t really be used. I still use the default (working) mode of probablistically picking up or down. This sends the drone in an ascent or descent randomly.
Impromptu Clocked generates pulses for the Bernoulli gates.
Squinty Labs’ triple vco is used to generate the timbre of the box, which are then gently softened through a VCV VCF. Finally they run through a resonator to try and “build up” some of the atmosphere of bellows and pipes. Honestly I still don’t know how to use the resonator well and it’s probable that a spring reverb or another plateau specially configured to emulate the bag and tubing might be better here.
