Sine O the times — a six-voice polysynth for nasty digitals

This patch employs waveshaping (duty cycle modulation) and FM feedback to produce some nasty, digital timbres. The results remind me a lot of a wavetable synthesizer (and in a technical sense, changing the duty cycle of a sine wave does constitute a type of wavetable). I originally started playing around with this idea because I thought that as the duty cycle of a sine wave is modulated, harmonics are added, which is the principle of “West Coast” synthesis. I don’t think this ends up being very Buchla-like (if it’s acid-drenched, it’s a bad trip), but it is an interesting alternative to subtractive synthesis.

A variety of modulation options allow you to shape just how much nastiness affects the sound. At its most basic, you can get some pleasant harmonics added to sine waves, but it can also go into distortion and noise easily.

The patch is set to MIDI channel 1 by default.

Controls:

There is an ADSR for the amplifier.

There is a separate ADSR for modulation, which can be applied to the waveshape (duty cycle) of the oscillator and to the feedback (FM feedback) amount. You can also set base amounts of waveshaping and FM feedback.

The modulation ADSR can be looped (only attack and decay are active in this condition); you can also choose to apply velocity to it or bypass that (the amp envelope uses velocity by default); it can also be set to a linear shape or an exponential shape.

You can apply a NOISE MOD to the oscillators, to add harmonics (in subtle amounts) or really grunge them up (with higher levels).

There is an LFO that can be applied to the waveshape or the filter.

The filter is global and can be used to rein in some of the nastier noises somewhat.

There is a reverb lite at the output, which produces a stereo image.