[LAD] Software sound

[W.Boeke]

Hi,

Yoshimi is a neat repacking of ZynAddSubFX. It offers all kinds of interesting sound, but I call it musician-hostile. What you see is a bunch of controls that you have to manipulate with the mouse 
while playing, trying to read and understand the very small labels (on a modern high-DPI monitor) and try to get the sound, attack etc. that you want. It is next to impossible to perform this, so you 
will only try some of the 510 build-in patches, but you can't modify them easily. And modifying the sound while playing is essential for a good performance. In other words: Yoshimi is way too 
complicated. It would be more useful to supply only 10 patches that are easy to modify.

Take for instance an ADSR envelope generator. In Yoshimi (and in most other software synths) there are 4 knobs that you must control. This is replicated from old hardware synths. Why not show a small 
diagram of the envelope, that you can modify directly with the mouse or with your fingers? The only animated visual component in Yoshimi is the output level indicator, which is the least interesting 
of all audio information. Why not think about the real benefits for the musician that software and graphics are capable off?

The actual subject of my post was about algorithms to generate interesting and/or beautiful sounds. So, supposed you have just invented FM synthesis, then this forum would be an ideal place to write 
something like:
"I found out that if you modify the frequency of a sine wave with another sine wave, then you can get very versatile kinds of audio signals. This method is simple and costs little CPU. See the 
following code snippets ..., or download my demo project at ..."

Regards,
Wouter Boeke

On 08/28/2014 04:42 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> What I wanted to point out is, that one feature for virtual Linux synth is missing, that could do what you are looking for. By joystick, mouse and/or touchscreen provide to record mix sequences of 
> sound volumes, (de)tuning, to manipulate filters, effects and/or the arpeggiator and let this mix become part of the sound that is stored to a preset. Yoshimi would be a good candidate to add such a 
> feature. My point is, that there are already good solutions provided by old synth and by proprietary virtual synths for other OSs. You could adapt it and provide this for Linux, use a synth like 
> Yoshimi, use the available sounds and let users make new sounds by using mouse, joystick and/or touchscreens, just by recording mix sequences that manipulate the volume or a filter etc.. "Vector" 
> thingies like this could provide amazing sounds and are available since the 80th for stand alone synth, proprietary virtual synth adapted this. I'm not aware that there are virtual Linux synth 
> providing it. To generate a new sound by what ever synthesis needs knowhow and some effort, using existing sounds and manipulate them using a joystick or similar is easy to do. Regards, Ralf 
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