 Hey, it's Anfa. Today I want to show you a very cool, pretty unknown, I think, open source sound synthesizer called TAL NoiseMaker. This synthesizer was created as a proprietary instrument and it was sold as a VST plugin, but it was open sourced and then the core source code was grabbed by the community and extended and ported to different formats. So right now I can use it in an LV2 format using Ardor, which is my Doh of choice. Here is NoiseMaker. I have routed my keyboard so I can play on it and you can hear it and I can hear it and you can see the spectrum, the phase, the vectorscope, the oscilloscope and the spectrogram of that signal. So we can take a sneak peek into the sound we're making. Let's first talk about the overall layout of the SynthSuser interface. The interface got me a bit confused at first. It's divided into tabs. You can open and close these tabs. So there is Synth1, Synth2, envelope editor and control tabs. And you have some options in the footer here. You have a panic button. You can load and save presets and there's a field that's going to also show you comments, what stuff is, what values are you dialing in, oh crap. Now by default we have Synth1 opened and a control, I believe. So Synth1 and Synth2. Synth1 we have first LFO. The LFOs can be tuned in Hertz. You can see here that we are dealing in Hertz values. They go up to 512.14, which is really cool. And they can also be synced to musical time. So now we have a quarter note. Or if I go the other way, we have dotted quarter note. You can assign them to various parameters, the filter cutoff, the oscillator pitches. Both oscillator pitches at the same time pulse width for oscillator 1 and frequency modulation for oscillator 2 because they have different feature sets and also the frequency of oscillator 2, sorry, the LFO 2, which is here. And this one is identical. Also we have this QT trigger, which makes sure that the LFO really starts with a key press. And also we can change the phase and there is this little gizmo where we can change the function. You just click and drag and we go through sine, triangle, saw wave, pulse width, pulse waves, sample and hold noise and noise. Now let's just use the LFO for something so we can actually hear it in action. So now I'm assigning it to the filter and that's a classic dubstep patch from the 2000s or maybe even 90s, the 90s. Yeah. Now if I use this QT trigger, the notes are consistent. If I don't have this, they sound different each time. Okay, so we have two oscillators. Actually there's three oscillators, the oscillator 1 and 2 and there's the sub oscillator. The sub oscillator only produces a square wave. Nothing interesting about it. It's useful to reinforce your sound with low frequencies. It can be used for some things, but yeah, it's very limited. It's just a square wave. The oscillator 1 has a pulse width modulation. It can produce a saw wave as a pulse wave. Oh yeah, but I first need to enable it in the mixer. So I turn that up, turn that down. And the saw. The saw doesn't respond to the pulse width and noise, which is loud. Now oscillator 2 is a bit different. It has more waveforms. It can also make a sine wave, which is the only oscillator that can produce a sine wave in this synthesizer. So if you're into clear bass, sub bass tones, you need oscillator 2 or you need to use your filter. Flip that. Oh yeah, because we've got some pulsating sub bass using the filter. Okay, sine wave. Nothing special here. So we have frequency modulation in this oscillator. And that means, okay, let's disable the filter. I'm going to turn out the amount to zero. Don't be like mislead. This is negative one. This is plus one. You can see the value here one, negative one, and zero is in the middle. I wish I knew how to reset these values to default positions because double clicking or using control shift and all doesn't seem to work. So you have a sine wave. We can use frequency modulation. Now you can see the oscillator, oscillator one is tuned. It was tuned one octave below. Now it's the same octave. Here we have the tune knobs. They snap to semitones. So it's two octaves up, two octaves down. And the frequency modulation uses the oscillator one frequency, but it doesn't use the waveform. So no matter what we have selected here, this is always going to be FM'd with a sine wave, okay? Which might be a good thing. It still can produce pretty cool classic sounds like we could make a donk bass, I think. Let's use the envelopes. So this, we have two envelopes here. One is this ADSR. And you can see we have a graph that's linear and then logarithmic. So this is basically the amplitude envelope. It can be used for anything else. It's just the amplitude envelope. And here we have another envelope generator, which is an AD, not ADSR. It's a much simpler one. Let's maybe move this to Max. So this thing, we can assign it to FM. And I can also use the transpose. Oh wait, that's... All right, I didn't reset the pitch correctly, did I? I think it's too much. That doesn't sound like a donk bass. Maybe I have the ratios wrong. Yeah. I'm a little bit afraid this is using the... This is making the pitch. No, it shouldn't make the pitch. Let's later one. That's weird. If FM gets slower. Yeah, it's definitely shifting the pitch. Okay, so we have no way to actually make a classic donk sound because we don't have a way to alter the amount of FM being applied. This changes the frequency. All right, how about the envelope editor? This is a very cool thing because you can add as many points as you want and create a free form function. Assign it to something, let's say FM and then make an amount. And now by default this is looping. So actually, yeah, so it's pretty crazy. And we can sync it to tempo. This shows 120 bpm because the session is in 120 bpm. Or we can make it one shot, which makes these two points first and last not connected. If you want to make it faster, you can do... Change this thing. Okay, that's a bit weird. But well, it is what it is. Now we've explored the frequency modulation. We can now stop doing that. Let's disable this. Okay, let's go for maybe a saw and play with the filter. I really like the filter. When I learned this synth like four years ago, it was the first time I realized that the filter is a really important component of a synth. And it can have a lot of character. Before I thought filter is a filter. And actually, no, I realized that filters sound differently. And I really like the sound of this filter. One thing you can notice is that there's no zipper noise whatsoever. I can wiggle this as hard as I want. And you can see there's no clicks in the spectrum at all. Like everything here is... It gives it that very soft analog sound. There's no digital artifacts. And unfortunately, digital synthesizers have their artifacts, which give away their origin. But this synthesizer hides that pretty well. It's really hard to tell this is not an analog synthesizer. And I like it about it. It's not that I'm really... I'm not a big fan of analog synths. I mean, I don't own a single one. They're expensive and limited. But they also have their upsides. And one of them is you don't have these artifacts. You have other problems like oscillators that won't stay in tune. But this filter sounds gorgeous. Let's assign an envelope. Now you can see here we have an envelope. The filter has its own envelope. So we can just use this cont, which is cont to our generator to change its influence. I want to make a quick falling function. That's a pretty crazy resonance sweep. And there's also, of course, the possibility to tune the filter to the notes we play. So you can see the filter opens up more if I play high notes. Because I shouldn't be able to see these, like if I disable the key following. You see these harmonics are way more attenuated. And also the low notes will show me wider spectrum. Man, this is amazing. Look how this oscillator sounds and look how it looks at such low frequencies. This is insane. Any digital oscillator that will use a lookup table, usually you can see that they are artifacting. And this frequency response also gets more and more full of holes. This one doesn't. And look at the spectrum. We're going to 20,000 Hertz. And it doesn't seem like anything is breaking. No aliasing, no, like, nothing reflects, nothing cuts off. Like it's freaking gorgeous. It sounds like are we having some aliasing? Or am I imagining it? Let's try it. Put it up another octave. Okay. And one more. Okay, this is as high as it goes. I think we have some aliasing right here. But it's still, is it aliasing or is it the actual signal? Okay, let's go down. Yeah. So there is some aliasing, but it's you need to really push it to the extremes and like it's really hard to tell this is a digital synth. Even the waveform itself looks so analog on the oscilloscope. This is awesome. Like this synth might seem limited. But look how authentically it reproduces a hardware synthesizer. And what it also has is in this control panel, we have a few things to help us. We have a global hypers filter. We have a detune control that makes the oscillators drift if we enable polyphony up to six voices. Yeah, you can hear that they start to slowly drift apart. If I push the detune all the way up, it's very subtle. It's not in the slightest overdone, but it gives you a little bit of that analog warmth, which is technical problems really. Maybe a low pass would also be good for analog warmth. But well, you can add it yourself. Also, the lack of aliasing in this is amazing. We have also vintage noise. If you look at the spectrum now, it fills up with pink noise. Which is really cool. And it's like this is just a pulse wave and it sounds so fat with this noise. And we can also use the filter drive, which is we introduce saturation or filter. Let's enable the LFO for the filter. Let me zoom out a bit. Also, I can see the hold. I think it drives the one LFO unit for all of the notes. Oh, funny. If I and other thing is it has some classic chorus effects. I believe these are from like emulations of they have standalone effects of I don't know what was profit or something else. The chorus units make it much louder. So I'm going to turn down the volume. And I figured like this, just this, these chorus effects with like if you disable this, they give you a pretty cool classic lead sound. You can also use some reverb, which has conveniently high pass and low pass filters. Really cool sounds. And we have a delay unit. This is by default, it has a feedback of one or nearly one. It can go above one. So we can have feedback that goes up and builds up to something. That's interesting. I guess this would be most useful with some automation, like using this just on its own. It's going to give you a note that never ends. So and can be synced to BPM. And there's delay. It also has portamento, which by default is off and we can have auto, which means only overlapping notes or on. So you can jam with this a lot. There is also some bit crashing effect for the oscillators. And we can see what they do. So if you have a saw, maybe a triangle. Oh yeah, and we're introducing digital aliasing. It really looks a little interesting on the vector scope. Some really cool sounds in this. Pretty simple sounds. But, you know, not every synth needs to have 50 modules and wavetables and, you know, 8 operator FM, this kind of stuff. It's a simple synthesizer. It's quite limited. But what it gives you, it gives you a really high quality of sound. There's great care have been taken to make this sound as close to an analog synthesizer as possible. And it's really amazing that this is open source. You can study the code and learn how they did it. I wrote an email to the guy who created this synthesizer asking how did he get such an awesome sound for the filter. And he told me that basically it's two things. It's careful tuning because each filter consists of individual pulse and how you choose the differences of frequency or of center frequencies of these poles together. So they create like a set of poles that create a filter. It matters. It shapes the characteristics and the frequency response of it. That's how I understand it. I'm not an electric engineer and I don't really, I've tried to dig in how the filters work, but I wasn't able to really understand it very well. So I hope I'm not spewing nonsense right now. But he said careful tuning and also slight randomness. The filter, I think the filter has some jitter in it. And we might try and actually try and prove it. Oh, I like this. So I think if we go for some high pitch, maybe I will disable the delay all the way. And let's give the filter. Okay, we have a little bit of LFO. Let's make this zero. So we have no effect from that. This is loud. I apologize. Let's turn up the resonance and turn down the volume. I don't think I can zoom in on here. I don't see much motion, but there is a little bit of differences. Like it's jiggling a tiny, tiny bit. I don't think I can actually measure myself if this filter has some randomness. Maybe it's not that. Maybe it's not what I think. Anyway, I really like the sound of it. And if you're in a need for some classic sounds, for some retro sounds, if you want to fool the listeners into believing you have a rack of moogs or moggs, first maybe try out a noisemaker. You might save a lot of money and time. And you may get just as cool results as you would with hardware. There's also some way to do midi mapping. I have no idea how that works. I've never used it. So yeah, I probably omitted some functions of the synthesizer. I think I've covered pretty much everything. Wow, it's pretty cool. Oh, I didn't talk about ring modulation. It's a thing. Let's do it, shall we? Let's make this synth completely covered. Okay, so ring modulation bangs one oscillator against another. So, you know, now this is the one oscillator, this is the two. And with ring modulation, they they are this sounds like an engine, like a car. So we have ring modulation. And there's also oscillator sync, which I believe makes oscillator two play like basically get cut off. Yeah, I think it's syncing oscillator oscillator two to one. So now if I rise the frequency of oscillator one, we have this waveform shortened. If I use triangle, there's some weird beeping. I wonder what's that? It must be the result of, oh, we have a fam. It's probably was a fam or what? Yeah, I don't fully understand what's going on here. But it does things. It's oscillator sync. Do you even PWM bro? Anyway, have fun. Remember that you can change these functions. It's really cool. Damn, I can't start playing with it. Okay, that's all. That's TileNoiseMaker. You can get it for Linux, Windows, macOS, I believe. It's open source. It's cool. It sounds very analog and clean. That was the thing. Yeah, that's all. Thanks for watching. I hope you've learned something cool. Also, big thanks to all the people who support me on Patreon and Liberapay. These guys allow me to justify the time I spend making these videos. Big thank you for that. And if you, dear viewer, would like to join them, if you're not joining them already, please go to patreon.com or liberapay.com and can give me a dollar or two every month. Stay safe. Stay sane. You should have more time on your hands now due to this coronavirus epidemic pandemic. So maybe grab the synth and make some music.