Synth software

[hippypants]

I ran into a couple of interesting synthesizer apps for iPad and Android devices. I wondered if anyone had used these yet. I downloaded the Caustic 3 for my Kindle the other day, and messed around with it, though there's a learning curve to some of the synths. But it's a lot of fun just to mess around with them. I was using the Subsynth the other day and it's similar to a Moog or Arp, irrc. The starting app for Caustic 3 is free and you can get it for Android devices or Mac. They also have a bump-up model for ten bucks which is pretty cheap. Here's all that you get with the Caustic 3: http://www.singlecellsoftware.com/caustic

If you have an Android device you can get it at Amazon

Here's the link for Apple

There's another cool app for the iPad called a Moog Model 15. It cost $30. and if I had a iPad I'd probably be getting it. http://boingboing.net/2016/05/06/the...l-15-modu.html

Here's another demo of that Moog Model 15 app: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYieuPJ_U2g

[Zeuhlmate]

Nope - but I have tried this - its fun.

[hippypants]

That's pretty cool Zeuhlmate, I'll have to look into the Geo synth. I don't have an iPad, but good to know. I was wondering if they had one for Android, looks like they do.

[Gizmotron]

Thanks for the heads up! I have tried a few free or inexpensive apps on my iPad but need to go for the Moog Apps.

I just got a Keith McMillen "K-Board" keyboard for a crazy-low price so now I can feel a bit more at home instead of trying to "play" on the glass screen of the iPad.

[Gizmotron]

By the way, my favorite music App is Brian Eno's SCAPE.

It is absolutely wonderful!

[frinspar]

That Geo looks neat.

I got Bebot after seeing Rudess playing around with it, then later grabbed Animoog. Both on the iPad. Fun stuff.

[Orcopian]

I have several iPad synth apps, the arturia mini moog and oberheim apps are sonically fantastic, great to have those famous sounds at my fingertips. THe animoog is quite difficult to get the hang of but sounds amazing. The korg ms20 is good as it has an analogue sequencer built in. korg do another one called the gadget which has several different synths built in and it's easy to programme patterns and sequences, a lot of the sounds are trendy rave type which I'm not interested in but there are still plenty of more classic sounds available. Another I have is called sunriser which has a lot of cs80 type patches, the vangelis blade runner sounds are great. Of course there are also a few mellotron apps available. I was interested in the new moog modular app but I don't think it works on iPad 2.

I don't claim to be any sort of musician and sonically these are no where near the real thing, but for not a lot of money it's amazing to be able to mess around with lots of classic synth sounds. if anyone interested in buying some apps a tip is that while It's a while off yet most of these apps Tend to be available at special offer prices at xmas time.

[WHORG]

Animoog - - - beautiful.

[GuitarGeek]

I used a demo version of the Arturia Moog modular. THere was some kind of trick where, when the demo period ended, you could just renew it, I can't remember how I managed to make that work, but after awhile, that stopped working.

Anyway, it's a good piece of software. Whether it really sounds like a real Moog, I couldn't tell you, but it does do a very good general purpose analog synth reproduction. I did a bunch of recording with it and even posted some of them to Soundcloud. But it wasn't without it's faults: the filter cutoff frequency control seemed to move in steps, ie if you swept the control, you didn't get a smooth "waaaaaaaaooww" effect like you would on a real analog synth, you got this stepped thing. Oh, sure you could use envelope generators and LFO's to sweep it and it'd sound just find, but if you say you were performing, and you decided to change that parameter, you could hear the stepping, kinda like sliding your finger up the string on a fretted instrument, versus sliding your finger up the string on a fretless instrument (which is how it should sound). I guess there's places where you could use that musically though, but for me it was a limitation.

And I remember reading online that the values given on the screen don't always equate to what the actual values of the parameters, eg you might set an envelope attack for 1 second, but it's really more like a second and a half.

I never got to use the thing with an MIDI controller, so I don't what it "feels" like to control it from a bunch of knobs on panel, versus just using the mouse to change parameters (which I found very restrictive).

Also, when you look at modern modular synths, there's so many things that the various modules can do that the virtual Moog didn't. For instance, the envelope generators were your basic ADSR type envelope, which would be fine, except that there's envelope modules now that can extend that functionality, you can have like a delay stage before the Attack (actually, the Oberheim Xpander, back in 1984, was the first time I saw a synth with a DADSR envelope, and it had five of them!), or you can have a hold stage between the Attack and Decay. You can vary the envelope curve to get different types of responses (there's even one envelope generator that lets you step a different curve for each stage of the envelope). And then you've got things like the trapezoid generator on the EMS synths, where you have the delay/attack/hold/decay controls (I think EMS actually calls the delay "off" and the hold "on"). And a lot of them can be put into looping mode, effectively turning the envelope into an LFO. I see no reason why any of these couldn't functions couldn't be included in a virtual envelope generator in a piece of software.

I also wished you could vary the noise source the way you can on something like an ARP 2600, where it's continuously variable from red to pink to white noise (hell, why stop there? Not have it go all the way up to blue noise?). And it would have been nice to have a way of crossfading between, say, a ring modulated sound and the un-modulated sound,kinda like the wet/dry mix control on a delay or reverb. And speaking of reverb, it doesn't have a reverb "module" either, though if it did, I imagine they'd forget to make it feedback when you crank the level controls, and needless to say, you wouldn't be able to "play" the "reverb springs" the way Emerson or Lord used to on their Hammond organs.

Then there's things like different types of filters, different things like wave folders, skewable waveforms on the oscillators, etc. But i imagine that takes a lot more "coding" to come up with stuff like a wavefolder or continuously variable waveforms, and that probably would me it would require more "space" on the hard drive or in the memory or whatever.

But if all you want is something that looks cool and lets you pretend to be Keith Emerson, Klaus Schulze, Wendy Carlos or Chris Franke, it's not bad. I thought the sequencer was a bit weird to manage, but maybe again that would work better if I had a MIDI CC controller that would let me change stuff without the mouse. And it's certainly much easier to deal with than hauling a real Moog Model III or 55 onstage, and you've got patch memory (though I think that another complaint I read online was that the patch memory doesn't remember MIDI CC settings), and I think up to 6 or 8 note polyphony.

(for what it's worth, I believe Tangerine Dream, on their last several tours, had giant flat screen TV/monitor thingies onstage, with the Arturia showing on them...which is kinda like the flat facade backdrops you might see in a low budget theater production).

[hippypants]

GuitarGeek: Moving knobs at least with the one I downloaded (Caustic) does present a problem. I would hope in some future version they might make that a better feature. It would have been better to make a slider control similar to the Arps probably for using on a PC/computer/iPad, etc. But for a freebie, I can't complain.

Even the above Moog for $30. is a steal really. Most of the better stuff right now looks like it comes out for the Mac products or for them first. Perhaps Windows or Android, etc. will eventually happen as time goes onward. (I hope). Though yeah, nothings like the real deal, except for the price difference. Since I'm not a pro musician anyway, that's not a biggie.

I found this for $99. for the Arturia Modular V, which I'm sure is beyond me anyway. Even then though I'm sure that's a big drop in price in owning the real thing.

It's a matter of supply and demand; if more apps and things are bought or downloaded, then they'll keep making more. I've seen recent videos where you can interface? a real keyboard with some of these things. Here was one I found that had the Cuastic3.1 w/ a AudioBus and a virtual Midi w/ iOS.

[GuitarGeek]

GuitarGeek: Moving knobs at least with the one I downloaded (Caustic) does present a problem. I would hope in some future version they might make that a better feature. It would have been better to make a slider control similar to the Arps probably for using on a PC/computer/iPad, etc.

Well, apart from what i said above, the whole idea of moving knobs with the mouse or the touch screen interface you suggest, to me poses a problem in so much that in my experience, when you click on the control, the knob immediately jumps to a value different from it was before you clicked, usually. Hence, you get this abrupt change in timbre, which I don't particularly like. I would imagine the slider would have a similar problem. But I do think it would be better, in terms of translating visual movements on the screen to changing a parameter. But it woudl take up a lot of screen space. You'd have to do a lot of scrolling, I imagine, to move from one section of your front panel to another.

What would be nice is having something where you click, then you move, and once you reach the value that the parameter is presently at, then it changes. It's a similar problem to what you have with patch memory on synths, effects units, etc.

What I'd actually like to have is an I-pad controller, that behaves like a 2-D ribbon controller, ie whichever way you move your finger, a parameter is changed. And I'd like it to be both velocity and pressure sensitive.

I was reading about one I-pad program, I think it's called Amos, that has a feature where it gives you like a pool table, there's two keyboards on either side of the pool table, and you have several pool balls, each of which can be assigned a note value (eg quarter notes, eighth notes, etc). And basically you can fling the balls at each other and as they hit the sides of the table, they trigger pitches. So if say you have a ball assigned to an eighth note, and it hits the middle C key at the side of the table, you get an eighth note of middle C. Basically the idea is to generate random MIDI sequences. And as I said, it can apparently send two (or maybe more?) different MIDI signals. That's another thing I'm interested in experimenting with.