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Is the problem of the oscillators not sounding very good a fundamental problem of these programming environments? I'm mostly ignorant of their specifics, but m

Is the problem of the oscillators not sounding very good a fundamental problem of these programming environments? I'm mostly ignorant of their specifics, but my assumption is that someone who understands the fundamentals of synth programming could patch oscs and filters into combinations that do sound nice just as well as they could in commercial synth software. Is there something preventing that from being the case? Or are you just referring to available presets?

djaychela 6y ago
Most good sounding vintage synth oscillators have waveforms that are far from the mathematical "ideal" that they are named after. This gives them extra harmonics and therefore character that vanilla DSP creations generally lack. Same goes for filters, too. When they are meticulously modelled on these originals, then they can sound very good, but otherwise tend to lack the character of the sounds many of us have grown up with.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
It's not the combinations, it's the tasteful application of oversampling, waveshape control, and distortion. Moog's iPad apps and the new UAD Minimoog both sound pretty good, so there's no practical reason why DSP synthesis should sound bad. The only thing preventing that being used here is the complexity of the models and the fact they tend to be proprietary. Supercollider, Max, Csound, PD, and ChucK all use the simplest possible public domain models, and even the best of the simple models aren't good enough to generate sounds with the production values you'll hear in a commercial recording. Generally the computer music community doesn't pay attention to production values at all. They're happy with a workable basic implementation of $effect or $synthesis_element, and they lose interest in the rest. That's partly because DSP with high production values takes a long time and work. There's a story that gets told about the TC Electronic 6000 system, which has a gold standard reverb you'll hear in most movies [1] - which is that it was the work of a team of more than ten people working for years. It's not hard to hack together a basic reverb algo from public sources. But it is not going to sound that good. [1] You know the ambient piano sound some movies have in their scores? That. If you want to buy that reverb the hardware costs nearly $17,000.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  To add - the CDP people solved the problem by doing things no one else was doing. It was Trevor Wishart's pet project and it was never going to be commercially viable, but he put some very interesting ideas into it. I played with it for a while and got a good few you-can't-do-this-with-a-synth sounds out of it. It was probably ten years ahead of its time and it's much easier to do that kind of thing today with modern processor speeds. I used to know some of the CDP people and there was a story that one of them left a script running on his Atari ST and then went on holiday for two weeks. It still hadn't finished when he got back. It would probably take a few minutes today.

djaychela 6y ago

Most good sounding vintage synth oscillators have waveforms that are far from the mathematical "ideal" that they are named after. This gives them extra harmonics and therefore character that vanilla DSP creations generally lack. Same goes for filters, too. When they are meticulously modelled on these originals, then they can sound very good, but otherwise tend to lack the character of the sounds many of us have grown up with.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

It's not the combinations, it's the tasteful application of oversampling, waveshape control, and distortion. Moog's iPad apps and the new UAD Minimoog both sound pretty good, so there's no practical reason why DSP synthesis should sound bad. The only thing preventing that being used here is the complexity of the models and the fact they tend to be proprietary. Supercollider, Max, Csound, PD, and ChucK all use the simplest possible public domain models, and even the best of the simple models aren't good enough to generate sounds with the production values you'll hear in a commercial recording. Generally the computer music community doesn't pay attention to production values at all. They're happy with a workable basic implementation of $effect or $synthesis_element, and they lose interest in the rest. That's partly because DSP with high production values takes a long time and work. There's a story that gets told about the TC Electronic 6000 system, which has a gold standard reverb you'll hear in most movies [1] - which is that it was the work of a team of more than ten people working for years. It's not hard to hack together a basic reverb algo from public sources. But it is not going to sound that good. [1] You know the ambient piano sound some movies have in their scores? That. If you want to buy that reverb the hardware costs nearly $17,000.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
To add - the CDP people solved the problem by doing things no one else was doing. It was Trevor Wishart's pet project and it was never going to be commercially viable, but he put some very interesting ideas into it. I played with it for a while and got a good few you-can't-do-this-with-a-synth sounds out of it. It was probably ten years ahead of its time and it's much easier to do that kind of thing today with modern processor speeds. I used to know some of the CDP people and there was a story that one of them left a script running on his Atari ST and then went on holiday for two weeks. It still hadn't finished when he got back. It would probably take a few minutes today.