Three Little Synths

I had a good bit of fun building these three little synthesizers in Max/MSP.

Strings

Here’s a string pad synthesizer.

It is based on a generator consisting of a rectangular signal that is pulse-width modulated by a sawtooth wave. Adding a few of those with slightly detuned frequencies and phases creates an ensemble feel. The result is then fed to a lowpass filter whose cut-off frequency is controlled by an ADSR envelope. Another envelope shapes the amplitude of the output.

El Condor Pasa

This one is an attempt at immitating panpipes, with the obligatory tribute to Simon & Garfunkel:

It uses a frequency modulated rectangular signal to generate odd harmonics with a small vibrato. This signal is then filtered and amplitude modulated to shape it into a somewhat acceptable pipe sound. A white noise is fed to a filterbank using the same harmonics frequencies as the rectangular signal, to simulate the contiuous “wind” sound characteristic of panpipes. The same white noise is also fed to a bandpass filter and shaped by an envelope to create the chiff at the beginning of each note.

The patch looks like this:

Swarmatronics

The last one is a simple swarm sounds synthesizer based on close frequencies interferences. It has height individually tunable oscillators, a global “spread” control and a lowpass filter.

The patch looks like this:

It uses this gen~ patch for the oscillators: