Fresh off of a month of nothing but grad school prep tasks, followed by a subsequent hard-drive death - in which I lost practically everything except for my newest tracks-in-progress - thank you God (and Craig)! - and a computer makeover from the ground up in Mac, including an upgrade to Max/MSP 5 (I am in production heaven, really), I am back to programming new synthesizers.

I was working on a 4-oscillator synthesizer with bells and whistles in excess, when I began to wonder how to - analog-style - patch a signal through another signal, modulating the original, or using the original to modulate a raw wave (sine, saw, square, or whatever). I got the idea because I've been getting really into Brian Eno's mid-70s recordings - especially where he was doing a lot of experimentation with Robert Fripp - most of which involved Eno running Fripp's guitars into his synthesizer and modulating ("treating") the sound. Okay, reinventing the wheel? Yes, I am.



While not achieving the result I set out to achieve (in fact, now I'm experimenting with multiple groove~ objects for this), I stumbled upon something else, which began generating very interesting sounds. What I have done here (as shown in the example images - click to take a closer look) is to modulate a sine wave by six more sine waves, each one modulating the next, and mix that with a small FM (frequency modulation) synthesis subpatch (called [p FM]), the sound of which is mixed into the six-sine cycle to the degree that the user specifies.

FM synthesis can sound very harsh (for example, much of Autechre's music involves lots of it). For the style of music I'm doing, that type of harshness is just not what I'm looking for. So by using a slightly altered version of FM synthesis 'proper' (or at least the kind outlined in Max tutorials), I found a sound that can give me what I want plus the control of adding bits of harshness to the degree with which I feel comfortable. Of course, adjusting the settings past certain levels will still achieve harsh, extremely synthetic sounds, if those are desired.

In Max 5, there is a 'presentation mode,' which basically acts as a user interface so that 1) the elements in your user interface can be organized and sized however you want without changing the original programming layout, and 2) none of the annoying-looking patchcords are showing. Also, instead of using comment boxes to indicate what each control does, I use 'hints' (unlike presentation mode, these were available in previous versions of Max) to conserve space. Hints are those tiny pop-up text boxes that tell you what something does (we are all familiar with these from common programs like Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Windows).

My numerical controls in this case are 6 mod-rate (one for each modulating sine wave), one master phase, FM harmonicity ratio, FM strength, FM phase, FM exponent, FM mod-rate and FM mod-depth. Clicking on the 'master' or 'fm' headings will reset those numbers to their defaults. Aside from the standard amplitude envelope breakpoint-function editor (and duration control), overall volume, presets, and initial note-value keyboard, I have a slider for pan strength and a knob for master sine-wave constancy.

The panning feature is based on a noise~ object which is in this case generating random numbers every 250 milliseconds. The slider adjusts the strength; in other words, 0 means the numbers generated are between 0 and 0 (no pan), and 127 means the numbers generated are between -1 and 1 (full L and full R). Because our sine wave is modulated by six sine waves, there are some 'low points' where the LFO is hitting 0 and the synth is silent, so the constancy knob controls how much of the signal is always playing. All the way up means no constant tone can be heard (this will be for me, no doubt, the most common setting).

Because, let's face it, this is a pretty gangsta synth, I named it jb.gangstaFM. I look forward to working out a few more slight problems and improvising the hell out of it, to generate some good Sun Hammer-strength material.