Oh I would totally buy a record labeled two tone ambient

Thanks Benn.

Yeah I spent the winter thinking about a super direct fm synth (check out my posts for six sines) and it was super useful precisely because it was just the algorithm on the front panel (although it was a pretty hairy algorithm with all the choices). Sometimes maximal is bad. But surge is fun!

Haha. The example I use a bit less in the extreme is the mini moog which is fixed architecture small knob count and amazing. It is a wonderfully designed instrument. But it fails the sense of being “powerful” that was meant here I think. It’s not even polyphonic!

Yeah more than a bit even! About 45 people have added code and there’s another big group of designers and testers involved. But indeed it all starts with that act of generosity from claes, who went on to start bitwig and continues to run a very open source friendly company!

I would say powerful in this context means: lots of features so there’s lots of sonic space available, with lots of configuration and modulation so you can push it around in lots of ways, and those features by and large sound good and are fairly efficient. That maximalist design has downsides tho

(If you haven’t watched surge has a patch which recreates Steve reich piano phase if you hold a key and benn kept releasing the key before the first phase while the surge team went nooooooo in the comments for about 10 minutes)

Heya Benn. Thanks for highlighting surge and also for holding the Reich key for 30 seconds!

The video is misnamed [SerumXT]. Would really be lovely if you could fix that to [SurgeXT] and then we can share it more broadly in the surge community without confusion.

I'm gonna start referring to theist 600 years of western music as 'the post monophonic era'

Thanks for the kind words! I'm happy for a mix of free and paid synths to flourish, and love loads of closed source products - i don't think I finish a track without pianotec and valhalla - but am also happy that theres good free and open source audio software available also!

Serum is amazing - I was just making a joke about the synth mindshare today. Six sines is neat but is not a comparable product of course!

Also: fun fact - Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin so literally no-one knew for a while. I often think about that when faced with situations like a version bump on my little fm synth the same day as serum 2 releases.

Fonts, hdpi on winlin and accessible interface seem like they are hard. are you tackling those?

Thanks and I’m glad it’s useful. Several people have worked on the wrapper not just me. None of the projects I work on have dollar sponsorships or patreons. Bug reports, code and documentation improvements, and testing are welcome contributions though!

So you don’t want to by my etherwave then Chris? It goes great with my seaboard!

Ha yeah

well you know. it will be done very soon. The requests are getting less frequent and the bugs are getting closed.

And big swaths of the work aren't in six sines anyway they are in the underlying libraries. Like today when we found a directx/focusrite/juce8/windows10 conflict. (ugh)

Band camp is up and we have free streaming set up there I think leeward.bandcamp.com/album/all-we...

Since I know followers here are mostly synth and music tech folks: whole thing impossible with out @valhalladsp.bsky.social of course, modartt pianotec and surge on the second track, Arturia farisa on the first. The guitars and basses are all guitars and basses!