Been a little behind in my posting lately. You’d think with me being off work I’d have more free time. But I’m trying to keep busy.
One thing I’ve wanted for a long time is to work on making some of my own synths. I downloaded a demo for SynthEdit a few years back, but didn’t understand synthesis enough to do much with it. Now that I’ve had some more experience, I decided to try again. This is a screenshot of an almost-finished synth that I made in the first 24 hours after downloading it. It’s since been finished with one more module (a bouncy left-to-right delay) in that open space.
It’s not... good. By any stretch of the imagination. I was learning as I went along. I spent most of my time going back and redoing things after I learned how to make them work properly. But I went from a single-oscillator tutorial with a basic explanation for how to do an envelope and an LFO to something with two oscillators, two LFOs, 3 effects, an one hell of a panic switch. (The switch pentuples the input value for the distortion and both LFOs. It can make a clean, simple sound suddenly sound like it’s underwater and playing on an old record.)
I’ve only made a handful of presets for it, and it’s entirely likely that I’ll never actually use it. But it was a heck of a learning experience. Every step of the way I learned more about what I was doing. By the end, I realized that if I’d known what I knew going in, I would have done almost every bit of it completely differently. But that was the purpose of the exercise. To take the tutorial and keep running once I reached the end of it. So that next time I start out knowing a little more.
