Per-harmonic additive synth effects — ideas?

[oot]

@sudara

I plan on exposing the per-harmonic trem rates/depth (plus other fx like stereo width panning, etc) at the granular level, like I have with the envelope at present, sorta like this:

This looks really powerful but it’s pretty much the example of where I think a graph would be an easier way of editing. Say you want all of the odd harmonics to quickly die out and all of the evens to ring out and get darker. All you would need to do is open the graph for decay, select “odd”, do one curve, then select “even” and do another taller curve.

@sudara

This is on the roadmap:

(HQ means “all harmonics up to nyquist” — for now I’m showing only the first 36 in the UI, as these make up the majority of the note’s sound, after which there’s diminishing returns in individual manipulation)

This looks excellent! Also agreed that harmonics beyond 30-something don’t require micro-editing, I’ve mostly had issues with them cluttering the interface in other synths.

@sudara

Interested in hearing more about this… Each harmonic has its own env — would this come afterwards and restrict the output to a specified range?

I looked at my comment again and I think I didn’t think through what I was saying properly.
What I was trying to describe would function more like a noise gate than a compressor, where all partials below a certain threshold would be reduced, so the emphasis on the most resonant frequencies would be exaggerated. And yes it would be after the envelope, really all amplitude modulation, as the interesting part of the effect would come from the interaction between modulation sources in my opinion.

What you’re talking about does exist on other synths though, Razor has a limiter per partial you can use to tame certain resonances.

@sudara

I wanted to offer a few “custom” partials, but I’ve been uncertain how to label/offer input for their frequency. I guess I could just pick a nice and easy number like “100” for the fundamental and have people enter the relative freq they want. There’s also some overlap with “doubling” which I would like to do (along the lines of that second osc in a subtractive synth that you can tune)

Perhaps something like a number and a dropdown menu for whether it represents cents/Hz/semitones/octaves? Both linear and exponential are useful and it lets the user pick the language they’re familiar with.