I love their introduction to sound synthesis. I never managed to turn simple waveforms into warm sounds, and their example of combinging a saw-tooth with a 2Hz-offset sine, then a low-pass filter and an attack/decay amplitude modulator opened my eyes.
Does anyone happen to know a more in depth tutorial, to create more advanced, maybe moog-like [1] sounds?
Emulating analog circuitry is not a trivial task. Monark is one of the best Moog emulators I've encountered, and it's implemented on top of Reaktor modular synthesis system, so it's pretty easy to look how is it implemented. And, to be honest, while I think of myself to know synthesis, this schematic was incredibly hard to understand.
So, no, Moog-like is probably too advanced for such systems. But it seem like it can be easily employed to have some fun with all kinds of FM.
It depends on how Moog-like you want to get, I guess.
Emulating analog circuitry may not be required to get a passable model of the characteristics of an analog synthesizer. While your model may never get to sound exactly like a Minimoog, the filter for example can be modeled decently with a simple IIR design and even more accurately with a more involved models (the Moog model from cSound springs to mind: http://www.csounds.com/udo/displayOpcode.php?opcode_id=32). This is the topic of a lot of research, both independent and published.
That reminded me of Sonic Pi: http://sonic-pi.net/
You can find some examples on the site and some videos of author Sam Aaron playing it as well. For those into Clojure, Sam is one of the instructors of LambdaNext.eu and one of the authors of Overtone, a Clojure synthesizer.
And I just found out that lambdanext.eu is down. I wonder if they stopped business, their last tweet (https://twitter.com/lambdanext) is a retweet when they gave a course in Brazil (btw, I'm the one using a Kendo hoodie). They're good instructors.
Very cool project and tutorial. Would love to see more features, in particular a visual editor to draw the notes. Writing the synths in code makes sense to me, but I think melodies are much better represented visually.
