cazimi - we just hit venus conjunct with the sun so i guess this plugin is a venus cazimi moment.
the story..
i knew i wanted to release a freeware synth with efficiency prioritised and the zero delay filters used in adze, i also knew i wanted to do *something* with the oscillators.. ("maybe add a granulator before the filter" i was thinking for most timbral range to cpu efficiency).
after not smoking weed for a long while i took a puff of satori and cazimi popped straight into my mind, no actual cogitation, just "exactly what i wanted to do". and it's funny to me..
i'm calling this BS synthesis
band separation.. and i feel so stupid, but at the same time, realise... the whole world must be stupid!for a long time, my question has been.. it's easy to generate a series of harmonics... but how do we separate a discrete range of harmonics.. and i realised, this is exactly what antialiasing does - any antialiasing process you use has a steep, discrete band separation.. so.. the key is to render the full spectrum with aa at nyquist, then, render the oscillator again with a frequency parameter instead of nyquist.. then, we can subtract one from the other and are left with a perfectly bandlimited, discrete range of harmonics.
for cazimi i used the most sensible for low cpu - two definable frequencies, splitting the spectrum into three bands, which can be mixed and processed separately.
a different mix of the same oscillator can be taken inexpensively and applied to an effect, or oscillator modulation. that's kind of neat.. eg. it doesn't have to be the "loud bands" that are most prominent coming out of the granulator.
i'm quite happy with the way it sounds, and modulating frequency points works smoothly with linear interpolation (i used d * 4 and cap at 1, so the first 0.25 crossfades the harmonic in). it's flexible and low parameter count so works well for "abstract synthesis" application because there aren't dozens of params to be carefully configured for a result.
i used a cheap "granular" process which uses an s-curve to fade between two delay taps (cheaply set to integers) with some appropriate randomisation to rate and delay offset, constituting a range of "granular"/chorus textures (it does good "tesla" electricity sounds with slight randomisation to slow window times).
with any luck i'll be able to finish and release my version of this idea, as most of the oscillator coding is done, but as mentioned, life = "surreal".
seriously, the idea of "arbitrary aa frequency rendering" occured to me in previosu development (experimenting with nyquist, "oh, quarter band sounds interesting") but somehow the simple idea of subtraction has eluded me for years, which isn't something to be proud of..
..i may be wrong, but in all my years of "keeping up with plugins" i've never seen another release with spectral splitting like this, so perhaps the rest of the world is also dense. it seems unbelievable that such a simple, straightforward method has never been built, but i've never seen one. both i and humanity amaze me, for the things we are capable of accomplishing while simultaneously spacing something so obvious like this.
sounds great (at least as far as low cpu oscs that "do something"), hopefully here with it soon
