[sdiy] Re: WHY all the 'old' stuff?

[Antti Huovilainen]

On Fri, 7 May 2004, Paul Schreiber wrote:

> set it. Because the VCO/VCF/VCA patch is easy to 'translate' into desired
> end-sounds. Back to the DX-7 (or the D-50 or Wavestation or....). There is no

I second that. For my master's thesis, I had to find a way to produce some
40 general midi sounds using DSP with some CPU power and very little
memory. This ruled out samples and physical modeling. I ended up using the
traditional VCO->VCF->VCA method for most sounds and got pretty good
results (instruments are recognizable) in a reasonable time. Two VCOs, VCF
and VCA can get you pretty far if you just have enough modulations.

FM would also have been possible, but it requires either some black magic
or insane amount of experimentation to make, say, strings. And the results
generally don't sound very good. Subtractive synthesis doesn't necessarily
produce very realistic sounds, but the results are often pleasant
sounding.

Antti

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