Cableguys.de have recently released an excellent community-driven software synthesizer called Curve (downloadable demo available). The synth has three, aliasing-free oscillators, three five stage envelopes, two filters each with ten modes, and four LFOs that are either, beat, note, or frequency synced. One of the coolest things you can do is draw your waveforms in the editor. You can even randomize them for some interesting results. Here’s a sequence that I created and recorded without any processing using Curve. This is one of my first attempts at creating a patch in Curve and I shared it to the preset community (available within Curve’s interface) as Bouncy Arpeggiator by AudioCookbook. Stay tuned for a lot more from this powerful and great sounding software synth.
Today’s One Synthesizer Sound Every Day involves using the arpeggiator built into Ableton Live. The arpeggiator, found under MIDI Effects, is a pretty simple tool, there are the usual up, down, up/down patterns as well as random, random once (repeats a random pattern), and random other (doesn’t play the same note twice).
This one minute and fifty second microtrack is composed of two layers of arpeggios created by routing Ableton’s arpeggiator to my newly restored Roland Juno-106. I added some filtered tempo delay and mixed in some reverb on the fade out to polish it off. I wish I had a piece of hardware that did exactly what Ableton’s Arpeggiator does (perhaps with the addition of a tap tempo button). In fact I started a discussion about this on the Electronic Musicians Network, a Facebook group started by my friend Robert Luna. Friend me, then message me there if you’d like to participate in the group. I’ll write an article soon compiling my research into dedicated hardware arpeggiators and hardware sequencers. Here are the arpeggios combined.
This is the third in my series of Roland D-50 microtracks. Once again I used an evolving factory preset. This one is called Soundtrack and Hold. What I like particularly about this sound are the harmonic textures and the spacial qualities presented. There’s some serious ping pong going on if you listen on headphones.
As part of my One Synthesizer Sound Every Day project I am producing a series of microtracks inspired by the textures of factory presets or custom patches, found or discovered within a variety of electronic instruments. Today I’m presenting the first of these microtracks that I produced using my Roland D-50. I have had this synth since it was new. Yes, the one with the custom, spray painted, yellow stripes on it. Back then I had to have my father co-sign a loan for me to afford it. Although it was impossible to sample with it, the D-50 had a huge variety of sounds possible at the time using the built in 8-bit PCM sample library combined with Linear Arithmatic Synthesis or LAS.
I lost interest in the D-50 to analog, sampling, and modeling instruments for almost a decade, rarely bringing it out to use as a controller, or for an FX patch here and there. After seeing Roy Ayers keyboard player using one recently, I’m rediscovering the instrument as well as enjoying the nostalgia of hearing it again. One thing I don’t miss about it is how time consuming it is to program your own patches. Without the PG-1000 (BTW: I’m looking for one of these) it is a very tedious process, although it does have a joystick to modify selected values.
Fortunately the wealth of presets available for the D-50 still makes it a desirable instrument. To create this track I used the “Clock Factory” preset to produce a percussive loop. I can’t claim this composition as my own, since I’m simply playing a key and using aftertouch to alter the pitch, but it’s fun to appreciate the evolving patches that the Roland engineers managed to come up with.
Today’s 