BATS2

Synthesized vs field recording of Daubenton's bat. Each time, 3x field recording then 3x synthesized. Very close.

Daubentons

Social calls and echolocation in Shrewton church

Shrewton - Social

Recordings of Brown Long Eared bats and Common Pipistrelles in France Lynch, and Common and Soprano Pipistrelles in Bisley. All slowed down 16 times / transposed down 4 octaves.

Bisley Benefice Bat recordings

Ilene and Jean discussing On a Wing and a Prayer and the impact of the Bats in Churches project on the Compton Martin church community.

BBC Bristol - On a Wing and a Prayer / Bats in Churches interview

Finally, it ran on the Pi with no glitches. Hoooorah!!!!

Summarizing again - 7 synths, 9 notes of polyphony, 4 stereo delays (with LPF), one global reverb (with LPF), no samples, everything computed live using naked maths for a warmer, more analog sound. And now running glitch-free at 900MHz thanks to an assembly-code insert from the foundation to force denormals to zero. 

And with the core hardware only £20 and the software FREE AS IN BEER to anyone in full-time education, my dream of a synth per child can happen. Global synthpop anyone?

This thing will be hitting the schools in the Bath area over the next 12 months as my standard STEM Ambassador dog and pony show, keep your eyes and ears peeled. 

POPCORN - on a Pi

A much cleaner recording than the one I posted yesterday, with some enthusiastic whooshing ... here's the backstory.

Over 52 years ago, I heard the Doctor Who theme for the first time at my grandmother's house in Sheffield, at the Stones brewery in Burton Road, Sheffield, the first ever episode. I was only 4 years old, the sounds terrified me, the whole family sat transfixed at the noises, which had been created some months previously by the awesome Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. No synthesizers, just wobulating oscillators, tapes and a shedload of patience, diligence and dazzling creativity. 

That was 1963.

Now it's 2016 (bloody hell, last time I looked it was 1978) - can you believe you can do all that AND MORE for £4.99 today? One Raspberry Pi Zero (£4), one 99p USB audio interface, and the difficult bit - a huge bunch of very specialized, hardcore, time-consuming software development.

This track has 8 Virtual Analog monosynths, one wavetable synth (polysynth but with polyphony set to 1 as I am somewhat lax with the noteOff messages throughout!) and a single sample replay synth for the Tardis takeoff effect.

The VAsynths are : 
Channel 1 : kick/tom - noise, bandpass filtered slightly resonant, and an EG to shape the amplitude
Channel 2 : snare (same setting as 1 but up the scale)
Channel 3 : the old faithful 'Martyn Ware Glitterclap' - these 3 are not exactly canonical but I wanted to add in a blast of "Human League do Gary Glitter / Doctorin the Tardis" for the outro. This is a burst of noise modulated by a square wave LFO, shaped by an EG to become a decaying train of noise pulses, bandpass filtered and quite resonant to emphasise the clappiness
Channels 4/5 : a pair of Radiophonic Wobulators, sin waves which warm up (some Phase Distortion, some morphing to slightly square) under a slow ramping EG, which also ramps up the LFO amplitude that is FM and AMing them. These have a bend range of +- 24 semitones for the giant 2 octave swoops
Channel 6 : the diddly dum bass riff. This is really velocity sensitive, both in amplitude and in brightness. OSCB gets louder under velocity, and both OSCs sharpen up under hard bashing - the 'fine pitch' modulation output is hooked into a fast EG. So really hard hits sound like plucked strings, sharpening immediately under tension then going true very quickly
Channel 7 : a bass 'slurp' for the grace notes - a slightly less bright version of the riff, and with a larger reverb send amount to distance it
Channel 8 : a noise generator with a keyfollowed bandpass filter, with some resonance to be played manually (hence hamfisted noises throughout). Heavily feedback delay adds SFX swishy whooshy things to the mix - really spacey, dude!
Channel 9 : a wavetable synth for the 'melodica' melodic notes
Channel 10 : EXTERMINATE! Samples, for the heck of it

Plus there are 4 delays with low pass filters and independent LR settings for delay, levels and feedback levels, plus a stereoizing reverb engine.

Can you believe it - 10 whole synths, all of them awesome, 8 of them virtual analog, on £4.99 of computer hardware. Less than 5 quid!!! 2016 is an insane place to be.

Thanks for the awesome arrangement Delia. And thanks to the Timelords for "Doctorin' The Tardis", spotting the unholy glory that is the mashup of Delia Derbyshire and early 70s glitterpop. So glorious a mashup that Hell's Bells, I just HAD to slap the tempo up from 140 to 143 BPM as the drums kick in. I go WHOO HOO every time that happens, and I don't often get actually excited by something I've created. 

p.s. major thanks to the team at http://dwtheme.com without whom my tone deaf / 'cannot do intervals' brain would have struggled to make sense of this - this would have taken a month rather than 2 days!!  

Here's video of how this looks as it's playing - the Pi Zero is visualizing the sounds it plays at 1080p!! Take a look : http://youtu.be/kFwYwq_wSU8 and http://youtu.be/B44f_NB6Tg0

A loving tribute to all things Radiophonic on a £4 Raspberry Pi Zero

Yesterday I tired of having to take a Pi, disconnect my UCA202 on my Mac from my monitors, connect in a DIFFERENT UCA202 just for capture (the other is on top of a high shelf), connect cables from the Pi to the Mac, just to capture a synth performance - too many analog boundaries, too many 44100 Hz DAC clocks that might interfere with each other - all I really want is the exact bytes that the Synth Collection is generating, captured as a wav file. And I had all that stuff already in the synths, I just needed to plumb it in and turn it on. So here is a bit-accurate capture of the Synth Collection, captured live on the Pi as it synthesized it. Brilliant idea, should have implemented it years ago - in fact totally awesomely brilliant for capturing a pristine recording of a performance from a live keyboard rig to sync to video. I suspect Soundcloud is internally turning this into a scungey MP3, but what I uploaded was absolutely, exactly the bit patterns that the Pi sent to its DAC as it synthesized this. Does it sound any cleaner? Who can tell - but it should. 

Direct capture of Synth Collection within Raspberry Pi Zero

Very short demo of the very compelling 'organ mode' I am able to get out of an almost unmodified WTsynth. It happens to be really good for approximating organ tones. 

First sound is just naked wavetables, and the tonal changes are as the 'trajectory' control is pulled around. The trajectory maps 4 different drawbar settings for a "Hammond" - or even a "Ham Pi" - and the final setting selected corresponds to a drawbar of "88 8405 088"

Then I start to richen it up. First a bit of reverb is added to give it some space. Then the big win, detuning layer B. The wavetable synth supports 2 layers out of the box that can be blended and manipulated, but for the organ tones I just stick the same program into layer B, and then for richness I detune it a wee bit. This brings in so much lovely movement and low frequency phasey / ensemble goodness it's genuinely brilliant. 

And finally I turn on the "Chorus Vibrato" unit that I implemented this morning, which is a very fast and simple approximation to a Hammond rotating air gap capacitor Vibrato, which sounds to my untrained ears comnpletely brilliant. 

All on a Raspberry Pi Zero. Very very cool indeed.

Organesque

"Here Come the Warm Jets" on a Raspberry Pi with human being on Cort MGM-1 fuzz guitar. The Pi plays 

Samples : The Great Paul Thompson
Monosynth : Doctor Who Bass
Polysynth : Distant Power Chords
Monosynth : Warm Jets Fuzz (panned left)
Monosynth : Warm Jets synth (panned right)
Samples : Caitlin Ooh
Samples : Caitlin Aah

And the Pi metronome flash provides the count-in for the human guitarist. The Caitlin Oohs are just providing a bit more backing track interest, following the underlying chord structure but playing inversions, the Caitlin Aah is tracking the sung melody line, the 'Father please' bits. Maybe one day I'll put a band together for one night only and do a bunch of Pi stuff. Then again, maybe not. 

Here Come the Warm Jets on guitar and Raspberry Pi

Voluntary In B Flat

Prelude

Flute Piece

Communion

The revised synthesis model in Church Organ for Mac delivers higher quality attack transients and sustain phase. 8 wavetables contribute to the attack phase of each pipe, 8 to the sustain phase, and harmonics are now truncated at the Nyquist limit rather than artificially at the 63rd harmonic. Reeds, strings and principals in particular benefit from the harmonic increase, and the chiffier flutes benefit hugely from the increased fidelity during note attack.

Church Organ for Mac - revised synthesis

Church Organ for Mac plays some gentle Bach. 

This is the updated "16 wavetables per pipe" synthesis model.

Tuning - a historical temperament of Silbermann 1/6 Comma Meantone, pitched at a modern A=440Hz.

Bach - Pastorella BWV 590

A quick capture of the Morphing polysynth with 2 very slow LFOs driving the morph parameter for oscillators A and B, and every time the 12 bar pattern restarts the 'C shape' increments, to pass through 32' sub, 16' sub, then 3 Casio-style 'fake resonance' modes, 1'+ super, 1'+ supersin, 1'+ supersaw

Synth slow variation

8-bit drums at 26.46kHz

Pi Pico should be good for at least 4-note if not 8-note polyphony of this synth.

Fixed-point Phase Distortion synth, fixed-point reverb

The purity of the break has been wrecked by adding an extra crash - this is to test out 'panning and downsampling' to get two cymbals out of 1 sample.

Amen Break / 8 bit / 26.46kHz / 181kByte sample set

19 samples / 8 bits / 26.46kHz / 8-bit companding / 181k Byte sample set, derived from the EXCELLENT Heavy Rock Kit from the Beat Shed https://thebeatshed.co.uk/product/heavy-rock-drum-samples/

Pi Synth

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