What is Reddit's opinion of ZynAddSubFX?

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I recently discovered that ZynAddSubFx supports microtonal tunings. You can even get non-octave repeating scales (like the Bohlen-Pierce scale) to work.

It's a very capable, free and open-source synthesizer. You might want to give it a try.

Here's a documentation, if you're interested: http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/doc_2.html

So the preset he's using isn't using an arpeggiator at all - it's using a sawtooth/ramp down LFO at a 1/12 rate to modulate the filter cutoff so that it sounds like a new note is playing when the key is held down.

The ones you might have seen on the project page are pretty indicative. Here's one of FLUID which is pretty standard looking.

And here's a slicker one but it probably has a lot of custom widgets.

All of these will look pretty much the same across the platforms. On a Mac the menu bar will appear across the top.

Also in case you're wondering one of the features of this API is that you customize widgets (draw them differently, etc.) directly from Haskell. You don't need to descend into C++. Quite a few of the demos demonstrate how to do this.

Have you tried Zynaddsubfx with the new gui called ZynFusion? It's a very very powerful synth. Backend is the same as zynaddsubfx, I just find the interface a bit easier to navigate.

It's a bit odd that it looks like all of the roles currently are linked to the same contribution overview page. I was expecting a branching approach, though perhaps it's not done yet. I'm not sure if the flat approach or the branching approach ends up working better.

I've tried the flat approach for a project I maintain and organized things (and color code them) roughly with the amount of technical knowledge needed for involvement. I guess I'll check back with their site later in case it's still a WIP.

Hey alexlg!

Allow me to respond to your comment.

1. A definition of DAW is pretty broad. I think LMMS qualifies. It doesn't have audio recording, sure, but then Ardour did not have midi sequencing before version 2 and was still called a DAW.

2. I am aware of Zyn Fusion. It is, however, neither open source, nor free: http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/zyn-fusion.html

Unless you are talking about some other project, but then I am not aware of it.

1. You are completely right about Helm! It needs a mention! In my defense, I was not aware of it at the moment of writing in Jan 2017.

I think I should either update this article or write regular updates and additions to the article. Helm will definitely get a mention at some point.

PADsynth doesn't seem to get much of a mention, although a few plugins implement it.

http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/doc/PADsynth/PADsynth.htm

It's good fun and easy to implement if you've got a chunk of RAM for sample buffers and a handy DSP library.

First of all, the TweachBench synths are great. They have some really good 8-bit stuff as well as just good synths.

Synth1 is also a really good all around synth.

ZYNAddSubFx is an incredible synth, but has a REALLY steep learning curve.

And lastly, don't forget about the Ableton synths, if you have them. They're pretty amazing in their own right.

There is a VST version of Zyn, but I'm not sure if it will run into the same issue as the built in version: http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/download.html

No synths will sound particularly good until you learn some sound design though, so I wouldn't dismiss the built in synths.

I got curious now haha :D
http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/doc_2.html

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Is this the synth? There is for example a setting there that randomises pan. And other things as well :P

I'm personally not a huge fan of explicitly linking all online profiles together. For proof that I have access to the official website, view source on this page and check out the comment right before </body>

You can run it standalone using the download on the official website.

http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/download.html

Note that they have a recent large update which is no longer free, but the old free version can still be downloaded from that page.

Any additive synthesizer should do, like this one is free. I also highly suggest to study nature of audio wave beforehand as it helps a lot to understand what additive synthesis actually is. I'm surprised there aren't any tutorials exclusively about additive, it's nice to see someone else taking a liking in it :>

An open source project called zynaddsubfx has some excellent pads for ambient. The development team just released a polished commercial version for $59. I seriously doubt you'll find anything so versatile and layered for less. http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/zyn-fusion.html

It's both. Most of my work is towards the standalone implementation, but there's a VST available on the kvr forums. At the moment the VST codebase has diverged, but in a few months the DISTRHO Plugin Toolkit is going to be used to return that functionality along with LV2 support (DSSI is already working and tested).

My musical tastes veer from Vangelis to dub techno, and psytrance.

I don't have any music experience really, I've tinkered with soft synths, but I find not being able to play really limiting, and lack of real time accessibly to knobs a pain too. I know ZynAddSubFX like the back of my hand.

But I think the first option on my list is something from the Volca range most probably the keys.

I think one of the easier ways to get into Microtuning is to grab ZynAddSubFX, a computer software synth, your favorite choice in Digital Audio Workstation, or SAVIHost, and Scala's tuning files from the Scala archive

Easy, cheap, and a lot of fun. Some other synths support Scala's *.SCL files, such as DimensionPro, and z3ta+, but both are expensive. If you have them, though, give it a try. =)

I am using Sony ACID Music Studio 9.0 with my Axis. So far I have just left it with the default conventional tuning. But I am definitely planning to twist things up: http://interdependentscience.blogspot.com/2013/06/remapping-harmonic-table.html

I've got http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/ installed which should let me remap the signals for my strange microtonal ideas. But Just Intonation should be every bit as easy.

Note that Just Intonation doesn't map in a straightforward way. The instrument is not really a tonal lattice. Usually those lattices just treat an octave as an equivalence relation. But on a real instrument you probably want to distinguish notes separated by an octave. The usual layout on the Axis has it so three major thirds or four minor thirds will lead to an octave. But of course this doesn't work in Just Intonation! So you need to decide where to put in little funny gaps or odd sized steps.

Not in the least. And to be honest, if you're just starting producing, Massive is not the place to start IMO. FM synths tend to be unintuitive to program and can be frustrating if you don't know what you're doing. It'd be far better to start with a simple additive or subtractive synth, and fully learn that and how synthesis actually works. A good start would be Synth1 or ZynAddSubFX.

I still will never know why more people don't use ZynAddSubFX. I get the GUI looks weird but the synth is so feature filled and powerful that the GUI just needed to be the way it is. And you get so used to the GUI that once you get back to one of those single windowed synths with all the buttons slapped in random places, they feel so cheap and underpowered.

I think the crazy part about ZynAddSubFX is not the extremely wide range of sounds it's able to make, from hard growling basses to soft bells, it's that it's free and it completely blows any propiterary soft synth on the market from what I've tried (Massive, Sylenth1).

ZynAddSubFX is free, why not try it out? See the full feature list here(http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/).

It comes with LMMS (DAW for Windows/Linux) and I've been able to get the VST version to work fine in FL Studio (Win64).

This guy's wrong, there is an objective best and it's been known for years. The one, the only, ZynAddSubFX does it all, babey, it's got additive synthesis, subtractive synthesis, freq-mod synthesis, subbass, effects, and that's just the known features. If you know where to dig into the cookie jar you can find the wavetable synthesis, a sampler, a sequencer, a ledger, a web browser, a spreadsheet, a nintendo emulator, it's like fuckin emacs without the thigh gap, praise God, it'll whisper careless nothings as you touch its many buttons and you'll find intimacy by your bedside as long as the laptop's plugged in. God damn is ZynAddSubFX a softsynth.

Just found this article. The author is clearly thinking just like me: "There's no basic wave with all harmonics falling off as 1/n^(2), why the hell not?" I imagine the same way of thinking led to PADsynth: "There's no algorithm to generate a chorused sound from first principles, why the hell not?"

In the course of learning DSP I often find myself asking questions like that:

• There's no continuously sweepable Gaussian filter, why the hell not? Hence this post)
  • There's no way to synthesize a Karplus-Strong sound from first principles, why the hell not? Hence this post)

A couple more questions I'd like answered:

• There's no continuously sweepable filter than can make different colors of noise from white noise, why the hell not?
• There's no simple way to play a waveform at arbitrary speed, why the hell not?

(If it's not clear, I'm not interested in actual answers why not. For all these questions, I've already read enough to understand exactly why not. I'm interested in how to do it.)

Komplete Start Zynaddsubfx Labs - Spitfire Audio Tunefish 4 Tyrell N6 - u-he Triple Cheese - u-he Keyzone Classic Piano Dexed Synth 1

There’s loads more... Have a look through this list.

https://www.kvraudio.com/plugins/windows/macosx/vst-plugins/vst3-plugins/audio-units/aax-plugins/rack-extensions/instruments/free/most-popular

You can, but if you want to recreate a sound that changes over time it's a little more complicated than that. You need to break the sound up into chunks that fade in and out, and do a Fourier transform on each to get the sine waves that make it up. Then you need to ensure those chunks overlap so you don't get gaps.

You can do neat stuff with this "overlap and add" Fourier transformation, like if you want to make an incredibly sharp filter you can just zero out one of the FT "bins". Want 1kHz gone? Set it to zero. Gone. Paulstretch works by doing overlap-add but making the resynthesis chunks longer or shorter. Clever stuff. There's another trick that the same guy came up with, too...

If you just want to make a waveform you can simply add sines. By picking the frequencies carefully you can make just about any continuous waveform, and as an added bonus it'll always loop perfectly. There's a neat synthesis technique called PADsynth which crops up in a lot of plugins, where you generate a bunch of FFT bins with random phase and shifted frequencies based on a particular spectrum, and then do an inverse Fourier transform on it to turn it into a waveform. You get this complex rich sound that - again - loops perfectly because everything is an exact number of cycles long (not quite true but close enough).

I'd recommend asking some projects that you use directly how you could lend a hand. If they're receptive to walking you through the process, then they should be responsive.

As per a specific project, if you're interested in user documentation, there is an ongoing effort for the newer revision of a user manual for the zynaddsubfx synthesizer.

While most methods of helping involve some technical aspects, the ones I listed are geared towards communication heavy roles. Individuals assisting in those roles are likely not going to be autonomous until they're well versed in the project. Even though they would not be fully autonomous does not mean that they wouldn't help the project considerably though.

That said these sorts of roles might not fit into every project since the contributor would need to talk to other contributors throughout the process, thus requiring some healthy communication channels. For some additional context, I view these roles as suitable for projects with a large user community which is significantly less technical than normal development. The idea that comes to mind, specifically, is a project I maintain with several contributor roles outlined on the project website.

Don't start with code. You want to first learn how the process works and how to productively discuss things with project maintainers. Start out with something akin to a simple spelling/grammar issue and expand into documentation to get the feel for the PR workflow, who you interact with, what the project's discussion channels are (mailing list/IRC/issue tracker/etc/etc).

Once you're familiar with that much, then it should be possible to take on an 'easy' programming issue since you'll know how to ask questions when you inevitably get stuck. Projects have many roles (ex) so, you should start out at a level that you're comfortable at.

In addition to what Corby said, you can try using Zyn via VeSTige. The VST version is available here. Then you might be able to use the "Control VST Plugin from LMMS host" feature (wrench icon in the plugin window) to automate parameters.

You cannot just copy .so files from LMMS and expect them to work in other DAWs. Standalone ZynAddSubFX VST plugin is sold commercially - or you can build it from the source (which is certainly not easy). If you download the demo VST from here, does it work? http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/download.html

You were totally right about the flute. Just around 700hz there was some funky stuff going on in the sample, so I've cut that out.

Usually for synths I use zyn-fusion, because it's seriously one of the most powerful synths I've ever used. It's a beast though, so other synths can get you there faster, if you already know what you want. So for this song I'm using some of abletons Analog synth, alongside some synth1, for extra analog vibes. The organic one I was talking about is abletons Simpler playing a short section of a different flute on loop, and then I naturally have some zyn in there with the really clean chiptune sound. The bass and rhythmic melody synth are both Charlatan, which used to be my go-to synth before I forked out and got zyn. It's fairly limited, but the sounds it can make are all fantastic. (plus it's free)

(trying add to the 2 other answers)

A MIDI keyboard is a tool that sends tiny messages to another tool (that's what called the MIDI protocol).

That other tool can be anything:

• a DAW interprets the messages for "controlling" how it behaves
• any sound generating tool; like a synthetizer (something that generates sound waves), or a sample player (play a given sound on a given input message)

For example I use http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/ to play piano-ish or organ with a MIDI keyboard. You can also put drumkit sounds.

I don't understand what you mean by "disciplined", but there is the excellent Zynaddsubfx.
Talking about DAW, there's LMMS, and a few months ago was released Bitwig Studio.

Pro tip: if you're poor, play around with ZynAddSubFx or CALF. Both are great synthesis tools. They have a bit of a learning curve but they're powerful and free.

You can learn a lot from synth software, and later use that knowledge by hooking keyboard to PC via MIDI cable.

ZynAddSubFX is very complex synth package and can teach you how different synthesis types sound.

MiniMogue is faithful emulator for classic MiniMoog synth, and good starting point for learning about LFOs and ADSR.

I invented few algorithms. The most important of them are these:

1) A sound synthesis algorithm:

http://zynaddsubfx.sourceforge.net/doc/PADsynth/PADsynth.htm

This one was implemented in several free and commercial software synthesizers. The first software where it was implemented was ZynAddSubFX an open source software synthesizer.

2) An extreme audio time stretching algorithm, implemented in Paulstretch:

http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/

Both algorithms was released under public domain, so anyone can use them. I am against patents, because the ideas needs to be free (as in "freedom").