In celebration of Bob Moog‘s birthday, Google created an awesome web based synthesizer – the Moog Doodle Synthesizer, aka the ‘MiniGoog’.
In this video, Moog’s Chief engineer, Cyril Lance, explains the doodle’ s capabilities and how they relate to the classic MiniMoog design.
via MoogMusicInc
This set of videos, from 1985, takes a look at The Secrets of Analog & Digital Synthesis.
It’s obviously dated, starting with the ”Listen to the sound coming from your VCR right now.” Nevertheless, there’s some solid coverage of synth basics and the videos also offer a vintage look at synths.
Sunday Synth Jam: This video, via RanKirlian, captures several soundscapes for guitar and iPad with csGrain.
This sound design tutorial, via DJVespers, takes a look at how to make a nasty filtered bass in Massive & Ableton Live – starting with a ‘crapallicious sound’.
Along the way, he looks at unisono detuning and pan spreading, filters, macros, pitchbends, and filter frequency automation.
Refined Stochastic Technology has released a new synth for iOS, S.709.
S.709 is described as an intuitive synthesizer using four multitouch points on the screen and the accelerometer to give a large amount of control over a sine wave output.
Controls:
This video, via ohdratdigital, offers a quick introduction to Reason’s Combinator device.
Here’s an analog vs virtual analog comparison, via virtualoberheim, of the SonicProjects OP-X PRO-II virtual Oberheim VSTi software synth for Windows and a vintage Oberheim OB-X Rev.2.
The lower manual in the video is an USB MDI master keyboard (an Emu Xboard 61) which drives OP-X PRO-II hosted in Steinberg Cubase 5. No effects or any other treatments were involved, both OB-X and OP-X PRO-II were recorded directly to disk, OB-X over the line inputs of an RME HDSP 9632.
The video switches quickly back and forth between the two sources, making it easy to listen for differences.
Check it out and let us know what you think! Can you hear differences between the vintage Oberheim and its virtual recreation?
Pittsburgh Modular has introduced a Eurorack ADSR - a four stage envelope generator with independently adjustable Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Release stages.
Module Controls:
Little Scale, aka Sebastian Tomczak, has released SampleRider – a Max for Live instrument that uses a user-defined sample as a table for an oscillator.
Basically, a sinewave that is modulated by another sinewave sets the sample index for reading back sample points from the loaded sample. Frequency is set by incoming MIDI notes. Velocity sets volume. The user can define other parameters (e.g. modulating oscillator amount and frequency).
There are two main oscillators and two modulating oscillators. All timbral changes are created simply by reading back from the loaded sample at different points/in a different way.
SampleRider is a free download from the Little Scale site.
‘Effectology’ expert Bill Ruppert is back, with the latest in his series of videos that look at using effects pedals as a sort of modular synthesizer.
In his latest video, Ruppert explores the possibilities of granular synthesis, with Electro-Harmonix’s Superego Synth Engine. No keyboards, samplers or midi pickups were used.
For more info and pedal settings, see the EXH forum.