Synthesizers Etc

I've been messing about with the JUCE framework for years but never really finished something enough to put it out into the world. Finally, I did, so go and grab it and see if you find it useful. That's all.

I went on a bit of an adventure with this yesterday and thought I might be able to spare the next person the trouble, although in the end it wasn't too bad. If you have SWAM instruments and hate the way they've implemented microtuning on the GUI, MTS-ESP can be a huge help. Here are my notes, based on setting it up with Reaper (any DAW will work the same way, though).

I've been tinkering with JUCE projects over the last few weeks but then discovered that Dexed uses it. I'm pretty familiar with Dexed and what I want to make isn't a million miles away from it, so I decided to grab its source code and see what I could learn from it. What followed was a series of small gotchas that are the reason for this post.

This is a quick brain-dump of what I've learned over the past two weeks about the Volca FM.

Dexed is a free VST plugin that emulates (and acts as an interface for) the Yamaha DX7, the first commercial keyboard to use FM synthesis. The DX7 came out in 1983 and was a huge seller and was responsible for many of the iconic sounds of '80s electro-pop, but it was also an incredibly sophisticated synth engine.