These days I'm spending time with music production stuff. As usual I find myself more drawn to the technical sides of production rather than the actual music making. So I do a lot of sound design. The one thing I find hard to reproduce with the tools I have is the crunchy sound of a certain 1980s home computer. Since the music production software I use has recently opened up their platform to third party developers I've been considering seeing if I could program a synth to make the sounds I've been missing.
I would share this on the forum for the software, but those guys are a finicky bunch so I'll wait until I have a bit more to show (I need two more big pieces an envelope so the notes have an attack, decay, sustain, and release, plus a filter to allow removing of some frequencies). But I feel safe here.
So here are some sounds my synth can make so far:
http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/saw.mp3http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/triangle.mp3http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/pulse.mp3http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/pulse_width.mp3http://www.scuzzyeye.com/tests/noise.mp3I'm especially proud of the pitched noise. Right now these routines are hard coded. When you run the executable it just spits out the raw PCM (at 96kHz, 32-bit signed floating point, mono). But it is using the MIDI note scale to pick the pitches.
So anyone who's played a video game in the '80s let me know how you think these things sound.
