baconpaul

Oh I would totally buy a record labeled two tone ambient

Firing up on short circuit last few weeks now that the six sines release is out and i have a bit of bandwidth. Loads of work on file export, modulators, ui, the browser, and much more. It can even do basic gigasampler loads now! Surge discord is where the action is but I'll post here time to time.

Thanks Benn.

Yeah I spent the winter thinking about a super direct fm synth (check out my posts for six sines) and it was super useful precisely because it was just the algorithm on the front panel (although it was a pretty hairy algorithm with all the choices). Sometimes maximal is bad. But surge is fun!

Haha. The example I use a bit less in the extreme is the mini moog which is fixed architecture small knob count and amazing. It is a wonderfully designed instrument. But it fails the sense of being “powerful” that was meant here I think. It’s not even polyphonic!

Yeah more than a bit even! About 45 people have added code and there’s another big group of designers and testers involved. But indeed it all starts with that act of generosity from claes, who went on to start bitwig and continues to run a very open source friendly company!

I would say powerful in this context means: lots of features so there’s lots of sonic space available, with lots of configuration and modulation so you can push it around in lots of ways, and those features by and large sound good and are fairly efficient. That maximalist design has downsides tho

(If you haven’t watched surge has a patch which recreates Steve reich piano phase if you hold a key and benn kept releasing the key before the first phase while the surge team went nooooooo in the comments for about 10 minutes)

Heya Benn. Thanks for highlighting surge and also for holding the Reich key for 30 seconds!

The video is misnamed [SerumXT]. Would really be lovely if you could fix that to [SurgeXT] and then we can share it more broadly in the surge community without confusion.

I'm gonna start referring to theist 600 years of western music as 'the post monophonic era'

Thanks for the kind words! I'm happy for a mix of free and paid synths to flourish, and love loads of closed source products - i don't think I finish a track without pianotec and valhalla - but am also happy that theres good free and open source audio software available also!

Serum is amazing - I was just making a joke about the synth mindshare today. Six sines is neat but is not a comparable product of course!

Also: fun fact - Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin so literally no-one knew for a while. I often think about that when faced with situations like a version bump on my little fm synth the same day as serum 2 releases.

Release Release v1.1.0 · baconpaul/six-sines The 1.1.0 release was released Tue Mar 18 13:57:50 UTC 2025 You can read changes from 1.0 here Enjoy!

Happy to release v1.1.0 of Six sines today, with many new features, fixes, and improvements.

The release is here:

github.com/baconpaul/si...

and change log is

github.com/baconpaul/si...

Enjoy!

Fonts, hdpi on winlin and accessible interface seem like they are hard. are you tackling those?

Thanks and I’m glad it’s useful. Several people have worked on the wrapper not just me. None of the projects I work on have dollar sponsorships or patreons. Bug reports, code and documentation improvements, and testing are welcome contributions though!

ChangeLog Wrappers for using CLAP in other plugin environments - free-audio/clap-wrapper

Hey a bit more technical but we released v0.12.0 of the clap wrapper today which lets you write a clap and get a vst3 auv2 and standalone for free. Thanks to all the six sines users who didn’t know they were testers. Chuckle. Changelog here github.com/free-audio/c...

So you don’t want to by my etherwave then Chris? It goes great with my seaboard!

Pushed a bunch of performance improvements to six sines for core cases this weekend and early this week. Things like "if your attack parameter hasn't changed you don't need to recalculate dphase in the envelope" and "if you don't use the lfo dont run the lfo". But makes a big difference often!

Ha yeah

well you know. it will be done very soon. The requests are getting less frequent and the bugs are getting closed.

And big swaths of the work aren't in six sines anyway they are in the underlying libraries. Like today when we found a directx/focusrite/juce8/windows10 conflict. (ugh)

Loads of great suggestions from the KVR One Synth challenge on Six Sines. But the feature I'm most excited about came from someone asking what type of FM it does (the answer is: it did PM). And then I added this to each node. If you want to understand PM vs AM vs Lin or Exp FM, it's really handy!

Wow loads of great feedback and bug reports from first five days of one synth challenge. Can’t wait to see the tracks!

All We Know, by Leeward. 2 track album

Band camp is up and we have free streaming set up there I think leeward.bandcamp.com/album/all-we...

Since I know followers here are mostly synth and music tech folks: whole thing impossible with out @valhalladsp.bsky.social of course, modartt pianotec and surge on the second track, Arturia farisa on the first. The guitars and basses are all guitars and basses!

All We Know Leeward. · EP · 2025 · 2 songs

My band, leeward, released a new 2 song ep today, “all we know”. A contemplative pair of songs written last November and December. Hope you enjoy if you choose to listen! open.spotify.com/album/4s0NIh...

KVR Forum: One Synth Challenge #192: Six Sines by BaconPaul - Instruments Forum KVR Audio Forum - One Synth Challenge #192: Six Sines by BaconPaul - Instruments Forum

Oh exciting! Six sines is the February one synth challenge synth. You can actually win prizes by making a track with six sines! Rules and details here www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewto...

Yeah exactly. I decided I’d rather write code and songs than blog posts after giving it a bit of thought.

So I was listening to junta over the weekend which admittedly is super early phish but the song structure reminded me way more of mid period Zappa than the dead yeah. But remember my real point was no one wants these hot takes :)

But also I’m curious if people would read about developing synths in general. I dunno. It seems pretty niche and I could just write code instead.

It’s funny I thought about resetting baconpaul.org to be more of a place where I write about music and music tech, but then realized that there’s too much shouting into that void, so instead post snippets here. I don’t think the world needs my analysis of why phish is more Zappa than dead