subsekt

winston wrote:

asm wrote:My thoughts behind doing something similar (but I've only breadboarded it thus so far and was targeting a slightly different form factor) was that a huge cost of an analogue synth is in the controls, case and IO. No one likes tiny knobs and cases, or menu diving. Plus indie developers have no economy of scale to cut costs and make it at a decent price. Offloading the interface to whatever control surface people already have is a much easier and quite a rational direction to take.

There are niggles though - noise floor on usb is often pretty high for a start.

On the whole, I'm pretty jealous as it looks a nice implementation at a nice price.

although i was a bit dismissive of the idea (like everything i guess ), i've been reading about it and i'm trying to figure out how it works.
Could you give me a couple of ideas of how it works, more how you breadboarded your version? was it a raspberry pi breadboard? how did you have the chips that were being the VCO/oscillators? did it require programming/coding?

i like the idea of pi based samplers, or diy samplers for that matter, but i haven't found many sources of info around it. what i have found i have read, but it hasn't given me enough to go on as i've no background in this electrical field. it would be great if you could suggest some things to read about what might be diy instruments like this.

I don't know how this works, as the manual doesn't give much away in terms of how you really use it, whether it will work at the same time as another audio interface etc. This side of things I hadn't really gotten round to playing with.

I was breadboarding a xoxbox circuit, I wanted to make a 303 (with mods) in a small stomp box form factor. Plug in a USB and away you go...

I've not really got into the raspberry pi - they are basically fully fledged computers which is a bit much for me. I'm much more into lower level electronics (its actually my job).

If you want to get into any of this have a read of "Make Analog Synthesizers", its quite a nice read. Or try assembling your own eurocrack modules, Thonk is probably a good place to start.

I just watched the latest Sonic Talk and Nick Batt provided some info on this (he got a demo unit). What he said is that it wont register as an audio interface on your computer. It does some kind of different routing through the plugin that you install to use it. But he said it was not too light on the CPU either so there isnt much of an advantage in that regard.

asm wrote: If you want to get into any of this have a read of "Make Analog Synthesizers", its quite a nice read.

thanks, i've grabbed the sample copy of it and will read it before i get the full book. it looks like a good place to start

The_G wrote: Diva sounds a bit clean and sterile compared to what it emulates but there are multiple ways of dirtying it up. OP-X, for my money, is the best software emulation of vintage hardware. It gets stunningly close to an actual OB-X and Matrix 1000.

I know you're an old cunt like me, but I don't know which analog synths you might own or have owned in the past or not, but forgive me when I ask : is this really still an issue to be raised ? SW is still an emulation and only gets stunningly close ?

No offense, but I got a Matrix 1000 and an Xpander here. Love them both.
But I heard quite a few soft synths before that got so close the difference is ignorable.
But when not just speaking about Oberheims...
Just a few months ago, I was working on a track from someone here where he used the TAL-U-NO (standard version is freeware!!),
and I wanted to redo the part with my Juno 60, so I dialed the exact same parameters in there.
You could not hear any difference whatsoever.
I ended up layering my Juno with the TAL-U-NO.

I did blind folded tests before with people at my studio, playing the original synth and a SW version,
and they were not able to tell the difference.
In this case, it was HW like the JX-10, Juno-60, or Fizmo and K5000r (who are of course digital).
SW synths were mostly shit 15 years ago, and a big part was still pretty much shit 10 years ago,
but nowadays... you gotta have a pretty damn good ear to spot the difference, especially when you use them in a whole track.

I'd wondered about something like this before. Personally I don't care about how "analog" a synth sounds, but, something like a distortion effect would be interesting.

Yeah I don't care.
It's character I am interested in, analog or digital.