String Orchestra Synthesis

[Phil Thalasso]

Hello all and thanks for sharing.
Busy catching up with latest developments in the forum.
Looking at Kevins' Arp photo, I wondered, whether it is possible to geometrically tilt the slider base, to make sliders 3D.

Best regards
phil

[k brown]

Probably is, but beyond my skills. Closest I ever got was cast shadows that follow the 'tabs'; I was waiting for feedback from Martin about any corrections/suggestions/requests, before doing any more on this. It may not even be to his taste .

Question for Martin - can Mono/Poly/Portamento be done with this? - when I tried, it resulted is some very unexpected behaviour.

[martinvicanek]

I was waiting for feedback from Martin about any corrections/suggestions/requests, before doing any more on this. It may not even be to his taste .

Oh yes, Kevin, it's beautiful! I didn't respond earlier because I am still adding stuff, not done yet.

Question for Martin - can Mono/Poly/Portamento be done with this? - when I tried, it resulted is some very unexpected behaviour.

I don't see why not.

[k brown]

Oh, no !! - not STUFF !

Hmmm, 'nother 'osc' perhaps? (is it an oscillator if nothing's oscillating? )

[k brown]

While awaiting Martin's additions, I added for my own enjoyment a simple Delay to this - since this has a built-in reverb, and delay is most effective before reverb; so here 'tis:

StringOrchestra copy.jpg (145.25 KiB) Viewed 17775 times

SOS_arpGUI_d.fsm

(1.9 MiB) Downloaded 1196 times

[Halon]

Wow! This is incredible!

[martinvicanek]

Thanks guys!

While awaiting Martin's additions

Sorry about that, Kevin. I got carried away by a new oscillator design which is easier to control and more versatile, so the project scope somewhat drifted away. I like your Arp GUI style, though!

[k brown]

. . .just hate those outa control oscillators!

[martinvicanek]

Hi gang,

here is something I discovered lately and, I admit, got quite excited about it. It is an efficient way to synthesize hundreds of voices in a single oscillator. The concept is based on (slightly detuned) implse trains.

An impulse train is just a periodic sequence of spikes, with the period being inversely related to the frequency. So for a single impule train, most of the time nothing happens, only every now and then there is a spike. So we may set a timer for the next spike and do other processing tasks while we wait!

The scheme is easily extended to synthesize multiple impulse trains: Divide the output stream into frames of some convenient size. At the beginnig of each frame, schedule the impulses of all oscillators for this frame. Then simply process the schedule.

By controlling the amount of detuning we may simulate a single instrument, a small ensemble or an entire orchestra. The obvious application is strings, of course, but I found that the material is also suitable for other sounds.

Here is a schematic with some 20 or so presets. As usual the GUI is terrible, and not all controls have an obvious meaning. I am still experimenting.

Randy2.fsm

(193.98 KiB) Downloaded 1163 times

I wrote a little demo track. It uses only two instances of Randy 2.0 (that's my working title for the thing), no additional effects.
https://vicanek.de/temp/Randy2Demo.mp3

Comments and sugestions appreciated!

[Spogg]

OMG Martin

I can’t pretend to understand your explanation unfortunately, but I recognise the power of the technique from those wonderful presets you made.

I took the Organ preset as a starting point and I was astonished by the range of sounds I got just from tweaking the Oscillator section. The filter system just adds so much scope to it.

Rather than worrying about the knob labelling, you could make an info button like Kevin does because it would be nice to have a reference description.

I’m really looking forward to seeing where this one goes.

Brilliant!

Spogg