Anybody recommend a good additive synth that they are using? I'm looking for a synth that has comprehensive control over harmonics.
Causal Agency's Additve Synth seems good but basic.
Does Big Tick's Rhino have good control over the harmonics in it's additive synth section or is it quite basic?
Thanks in advance for any help.

Have a look at Virsyn Cube
http://www.virsyn.de/en/E_Products/E_CUBE/e_cube.html

You can download a demo
http://www.virsyn.de/en/E_Demo/e_demo.html

thanks format j.
I'd heard of cube but it didn't seem to receive good reviews but I know Tera is amazing

It looks like it got nice reviews as you can probably see here:
http://www.kvr-vst.com/get.php?mode=show&id=463

muz wrote:

Anybody recommend a good additive synth that they are using? I'm looking for a synth that has comprehensive control over harmonics. Causal Agency's Additve Synth seems good but basic. Does Big Tick's Rhino have good control over the harmonics in it's additive synth section or is it quite basic? Thanks in advance for any help.

I looked at several additive synths or synths that have additive features - Vertigo (real CPU pig), Rhino, Ethereal, and am also aware of Cube, CA5000 and Additive Synth.

I ended up picking Ethereal for additive synthesis since overall it was less complex, but I'll probably get Rhino too, because of all of its other features. The best thing to do is download demos and play (although Ethereal weighs in at almost 5M zipped and Rhino's about 9M).

Doug

seems it's a good opportunity to ask:
what is additive synthesis?.. and what does it bring?

try this
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun00/articles/synthsec.htm

It's quite involved to explain but the theory isn't that difficult. I have a feeling that additive synthesis is going to become all the rage with the plethora of sutractive synthesis saturating the market

Thanks for the tips all

steph wrote:

seems it's a good opportunity to ask: what is additive synthesis?.. and what does it bring?

A standard subtractive synth uses oscillators that generate waveforms that have various harmonics in them. IIRC the square wave contains only the odd harmonics, for example. It uses filters to remove harmonics.

By comparison, an additive synth starts with a sine wave, and you choose which harmonic/partial you wish to add to the "fundamental" - each of which is the root note divided by the harmonic number.

The simplest example is a Hammond organ, which has these harmonics - each of which can be given a "strength" of 0 to 8:
sub-fundamental (16')
sub/3 (5-1/3')
fundamental (8')
2nd (4')
3rd (2-2/3')
4th (2')
fifth (1-3/5')
sixth (1-1/3')
eighth (1')

Synths that feature additive synthesis offer a lot more harmonics than that ... Vertigo offers 256 for example, and Ethereal offers 30 harmonics.

In theory one wouldn't need/use filters for an additive synth. But in practice, Vertigo, Rhino and Ethereal have standard LPF/HPF/etc filters.

Ethereal uses the additive waveform as "another oscillator" to drive a standard subtractive synth setup. I believe it's fair to say the same thing about Rhino (Rhino has an FM matrix and other features as well).

Doug

If you are interested in working with additive, then you will have a few choices...only one of which is currently "officially" released. There is Cube (ah yes, the reviews. See, additive always seems to get short shrift in the reviews department, mainly because it is, admittedly, difficult to come to terms with at first. Trust your ears and the demo). Cube is an easy to grasp additive. You can whip up sounds pretty quickly, and eventually get a handle on what you are doing. It's available now. The next released will likely be Vertigo, which you can try as a beta. This is a bit more complex, and can also do resynthesis, one of additives main claims to fame. Finally, the CA5000 (or Cameleon) is on the way. This is the most complex of the lot, but is not hard to get your head around. It too will do resynthesis, and then give you control over all of those harmonics via a comphrehensive set of parameters. It is the most costly of the three, but will be worth every penny. I am finishing up some demos of it's resynthesis this week, which will most likely be on the Camel Audio website.

A word about the others mentioned. These, while being excellent synths, are not exactly "additive" in their approach. They use a simplified additive method to allow you to create wave shapes in the oscillator section, but then they use conventional subtractive synthesis to manipulate those waveshapes. Having said that, they are all wonderful synths, and could be a good starting point for getting your head around additive. Plus, you'd get a great synth in the bargain (having played with the demos, I have to say that I am madly in love with both Rhino and Ehtereal).

muz wrote:

I have a feeling that additive synthesis is going to become all the rage with the plethora of sutractive synthesis saturating the market

It may--it seems there is potential there. Two big hurdles IMO will be complexity of programming and expanding the range of sound (i.e., not all presets sound similar).

Scot Solida wrote:

A word about the others mentioned. These, while being excellent synths, are not exactly "additive" in their approach. They use a simplified additive method to allow you to create wave shapes in the oscillator section, but then they use conventional subtractive synthesis to manipulate those waveshapes. Having said that, they are all wonderful synths, and could be a good starting point for getting your head around additive. Plus, you'd get a great synth in the bargain (having played with the demos, I have to say that I am madly in love with both Rhino and Ehtereal).

I agree 100% with the above (-:

I got Ethereal about 1.5 weeks ago and can't stop playing with it... it's my current favorite, 160 presets with a broad palette to draw from. I liked Ethereal so much I ended up getting Industry over the weekend (and Jon gave me Granite as well, since had I known I'd have just bought the package up-front - such service!)... ConcreteFX synths are somewhat under-recognized, so I guess I write some reviews this week...

Rhino's still on my radar (Tick's just released a new version and some new patch banks)... but I'm "pacified" for now, and I just bought a new keyboard (Yamaha PSR-2000), so I guess I can wait a bit before buying any new/more software.

Doug

thanks for the info and link about additive synthesis!!

another question: what is resynthesis?

Resynthesis...okay, there is an old idea in physics that every sound we hear can be broken down into sine waves and how they interact over time. This creates a complex sound. Additive synthesis is based on this idea, that of building up complex sounds from a huge amount of simple sine waves, each with their own time and pitch envelopes (preferably very complex envelopes). The idea behind resynthesis is that you can have the synthesizer examine any sound, and then resynthesize that sound as a bunch of sine waves (or partials), with all of those envelopes and such. The cool thing is that you can then go in and play with all of those envelopes and parameters, giving you very precise control over sound. The biggest benefit of resynthesis is that as you might guess, additive is very, very intense work. Resynthesis simplifies the matter by giving you a good starting point.

Resynthesis must be the technique of the future - I can't wait!

Although I don't know how it works, I'm hoping that it works something like this:

Resynthesis first analyzes the sound that you want to create - say the sound of an oboe that you have in a wav file. Then all the appropriate additive synthesizer settings are created: oscillator (sine wave) frequencies, amplitudes and envelopes, filters maybe. With these settings, the synthesizer will be able to play back that original oboe sound pretty well (limited by how good the synthesis algorithms are). But here is the cool part: now that all the parameters of the synthesizer are completely set up for the oboe sound, the sound designer can go in and tweak those parameters to get a lot of variations of those sounds. Ultimately, I'm hoping resynthesis can analyze a set of sounds (oboe sounds with different attacks, for example) and create a set of parameters to go smoothly from one sound to another, depending on some cc mod controller. In this way, not only real cool sounds can be made, but those sounds can be very expressive.

I wonder how years it will take resynthesis technique to advance that far?

YBaCuO

jeesus scot.. i can't wait to hear the resynth demos!.. i hope this thing makes supercollider and csound somthing i never have to use again for my morphing needs.

Quote:

I wonder how years it will take resynthesis technique to advance that far?

The Camel Audio 5000 will do that. And it is less than a year away

Quote:

Although I don't know how it works, I'm hoping that it works something like this: Resynthesis first analyzes the sound that you want to create - say the sound of an oboe that you have in a wav file. Then all the appropriate additive synthesizer settings are created: oscillator (sine wave) frequencies, amplitudes and envelopes, filters maybe. With these settings, the synthesizer will be able to play back that original oboe sound pretty well

Bullseye.

This sort of thing has been done for ages, but never much like it's potential. Owners of the Kawai K5000 (myself among them) have been resampling short sounds for ages, and the possibilities were certainly hinted at by the lovely but flawed Axcell Technos in the eighties.

The good news is that Symbolic Sound's Kyma can do it (for a substantial price!). The better news is that the CA5000 will do it for considerably less money and is not too far off. Imagine a squeeky weel morphing into a girl's voice, and you get the idea of the possibilities. It aint just crossfading, mind you. Since the sound is not a sample but a patch containing synth parameters, it can be altered at its very root level. Now, it isn't perfect...there are a whole set of rules to be followed to get good resynthesized waves, just are there are rules to follow to record any audio (and it is a recording...sort of), but with the proper techniques and a good imagination, you will have access to all sorts of new sonic territories.

dougsyo wrote:

I ended up picking Ethereal for additive synthesis since overall it was less complex, but I'll probably get Rhino too, because of all of its other features.

Yes, Ethereal is an excellent plugin. I have been using it all night as it goes

Don't know how it compares to Rhino though as I haven't had chance to try this yet

You know it doesn't seem that long ago that everyone was crying out for a VST additive synth and there was none at all....now we have quite a few good quality additive synths to choose from. Great isn't it

Hi there

Thanks for all positive feedback about Ethereal, nice to see.

I am thinking about doing a proper additive synth eventually but the main problem is one of control, how do you make it easy to use say 64 partials with each partial having it's on volume, pan and/or pitch envelope & LFO.

Also it's very heavy on the CPU, Ethereal got around this by pre-render the waves as soon as the partials were set rather than on the fly. Some interesting things to look into I think

Cheers

Jon: ConcreteFX

Vertigo already does resynthesis.

muz wrote:

I have a feeling that additive synthesis is going to become all the rage with the plethora of sutractive synthesis saturating the market

Why? At the end of the day its about the sound, not how you make it and additive synths have a comparitively limited range of applications. Subtractive synths are ubiquitous because they get the job done and everyone can get the most out of them. I owned a K5000 and I found the additive synth engine to be a pain in the arse to the point that I almost never used it.

I'm a very satisfied cube customer. I own several hardware analog synths. i find the CUBE synth to be an entirely different palette of sounds.

Kyma is the best platform at the mo for resynthesis, though its probably out of most peoples price range, though if youve got the bucks Id highly recommend it.
For windows theres also csound, SMS (http://www.iua.upf.es/%7Esms/) and CDP (http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masjpf/CDP/CDP.htm) .
If you fancy having a go with csound but dont fancy the programming try Cecelia (http://music.ucdavis.edu/re4m/cecilia/)
theres also Adsyn (http://www.bridle.demon.co.uk/adsyn.htm)
and Audiomulch has a basic additive synth though theres nothing stopping you from grouping several together to make a real Mutha!!

BONES quoth At the end of the day its about the sound, not how you make it

Yup.

and additive synths have a comparitively limited range of applications.

Whether they're 'comparitively limited' or not, I thought it was about the sound? And additive does some types of sounds that subtractives dont.

Subtractive synths are ubiquitous because they get the job done and everyone can get the most out of them.

So? I thought it was about the sound, not the ubiquity?