Decided to go with a basic (single oscillator) synth to try and get blep synthesis sorted. I am quite impressed by the array of sounds the Korg PolySix / Roland Juno6 can produce so decided to model it around those.
Every one of these I do is getting better, both graphically and audibly. Obviously still a long way to go before I get to the level of some of the commercial synths out there but I’m on my way.
After recovering from my initial failure to do a decent Nord Lead I decided I should probably go for smaller synths and my own designs rather than spending hours trying to correctly recreate synthesizers that were limited by a completely different set of constraints. I did quite a few of these and here is a selection:
An MS-20 / StarWars inspired semi-modular synthesizer. It sounds ok, but still not great. It is really quite hard to get something that is simple and sounds fantastic. I was quite happy with the look and spent quite a while agonizing over a minimalistic set of controls.
I was quite happy with the idea but the implementation felt a bit unfinished so I spent a bit of time polishing. The sound is now effects laden and half decent. I actually hooked this up to my Wii Guitar Hero controller and had a great time. 5 buttons = 32 combinations (chords) so as long as you are just strumming away you can play a bunch of songs without having to re-assign chords.
More game-distractions. I play guitar a bit in my spare-spare time (about 1min/day) so a guitar synth was always on the cards. It sounds ok but is more useful as a chord reference rather than an instrument. Click to play:
I really love the look of the Nord Lead (don’t own one unfortunately) and largely inspired the whole synth thing. My version is currently quite incomplete and sounds terrible, mostly because of the filter. I plan to come back to this eventually and would really like to get it working well. I sort of abandoned it after it became clear just how much work it would take to finish.
