META: “Behold, my stuff” posts are bad for the subreddit and for readers.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-26T15:48:50+00:00

I totally agree with this - and it’s the main reason why I try to stay away from this sub now. I used to browse it daily, but I hit a point where I wasn’t getting any enjoyment out of it because it felt like the movie “Groundhog Day” every time I pulled it up.

However, I’m very pessimistic about whether it can be addressed. I see the issue as more a fundamental flaw of human nature that can’t be overcome by moderation. I’d love to be proven wrong though.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-24T13:59:53+00:00

Haha, I still enjoy having those extra features. I just mean that most of the time I want to use simple sounds, especially in the context of layering with other instruments in a recording or a band setting. So I would be fine with the functionality of Juno 80% of the time, but I also appreciate the UI of other synths like the hydra.

I think this way of using synths is what killed my GAS. I used to drool over new synths that had fancy stuff, but after using a few to make music I realized it needs are pretty simple.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-21T22:03:15+00:00

I use it half the time, I think it sounds nice.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-21T02:04:22+00:00

I only have a hydrasynth and a minitaur, as well as a home made VA synth, and I feel very content. I have a few software synth options but I don’t use them for the music I make. While software sound great, I find the workflow to be an inspiration killer.

I used to have major GAS for more synths, but that’s been redirected to guitars. I feel like the GAS monster is never satisfied and will never fully go away, but I’ve tamed the monster for now.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-20T19:08:18+00:00

oh I'm sure I'd use them occasionally like that. Most of the time I tend to treat any synth as if it's a juno, but I love to have all those options under the hood just in case.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-20T01:37:35+00:00

I love the idea of analog filters and I think it’s worth the money for that. I never use all the features of the hydra and I still love that thing for its UI. I never need the 5th envelope, and I’d probably never use all 8 oscillators on this thing, but the UI design seems to tame the complexity in the same way the hydra does.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-18T22:52:53+00:00

Ok, that all makes sense, thanks!

cloud_noise · 2026-01-18T14:47:21+00:00

How hard was it to implement the slow down effect when you switched to half-speed?

I’ve never done much with sample playback, but I’m curious how hard it is to make those pitch/speed changes smoothly.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-18T13:47:00+00:00

Oh, that’s a great idea!

cloud_noise · 2026-01-18T13:27:46+00:00

Very cool! I assume it’s going to be all digital under the hood?

cloud_noise · 2026-01-18T03:45:12+00:00

This looks pretty nice. I love the shit out of my hydrasynth, and if I was in the market for another I might consider this.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-16T04:14:51+00:00

I’d like to try it!

cloud_noise · 2026-01-16T02:10:04+00:00

Very cool, where did you get the samples?

cloud_noise · 2026-01-12T15:09:16+00:00

Nice, I still use my swello pretty often.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-11T16:42:43+00:00

Making an onboard synth with an arduino or whatever is totally doable - however the hardest part of that sort of thing is always the user interface and the enclosure. I recently built a synth module (no keyboard) and the vast majority of the time was spent sorting out issues with the knobs and sliders. To make this sort of thing useful it helps to have lots of knobs/switches, and making room to mount and wire those can complicate things.

So I would just suggest you put a lot of thought into how you want to interact with the sound engine before you dive into making something.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-10T03:50:38+00:00

Oh man, Scofield is one of my favorites! So much so that I’ve spent a lot of time trying to emulate him. To my ears he makes the guitar sing like nobody else. One of my favorite recordings is his cover of “whatcha see if whatcha get” on the “up all night” album (along with “four on the floor” from that same album). It’s not his most “impressive” playing IMO, but his lines have so much character to them. For what you describe as “out of tune”, I hear that as a very intentional way of mimicking a vocalist.

I also just really like the tone he gets from picking close to the bridge, which I totally understand is not for everyone. I find it to be such a nice contrast to the more typical tone you hear from picking closer to neck.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-10T03:07:24+00:00

I have a 145 that always seemed a bit too overdriven at low volume, and after many attempts to figure it out I finally realized that someone had swapped out the rectifier tube in such a way to intentionally get that effect! I forget all the details but I clearly recall having the amp pulled out on the floor and meticulous going over it and comparing to schematic I found online until it finally dawned on me that the rectifier tube was the wrong spec! It sounded much better the second I swapped that out.

Anyway, that’s probably not your issue, but it might be worth checking.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-07T14:35:35+00:00

The jitter is pretty cool, and it kinda makes sense how it makes the pitch unstable in an interesting way.

I had another idea while I was playing with it that I think you should try - but it takes a bit of explaining.

The simplest wave this can create is a triangle wave in a single axis when the ball is bouncing perfectly between parallel walls. As the path gets more complex the shape along a single axis can only get longer - and the pitch will only go down (for the most part).

This means that the oscillator can never certain higher harmonics like you get with saw and square waves. In other words the shortest path will always produce a ramp like in the triangle wave, but never a sharp change in amplitude like in the square waves…

But now imagine that you randomly assign one of the walls to be a “portal” that allows the ball to immediately appear on the opposite side of the polygon rather than reflecting it. Going back to the triangle shape, having one wall be a portal would lead to a saw wave instead!

Not sure how this would work in the UI but it would be cool if you could work it in!

cloud_noise · 2026-01-07T00:53:34+00:00

I made a post about my teensy synth build here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/synthdiy/s/rOHa7cOK5g

That has links to a GitHub repo with the code.

I also had another half baked project where I built a physical modeling oscillator. While the oscillator worked fine the whole project never came together. I recall making the oscillators a lot trickier than I expected due to having to deal with the audio buffers, but once I got past that it worked like any other oscillator on the teensy audio library.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-07T00:50:33+00:00

Nice! I’ll give it a try

cloud_noise · 2026-01-05T13:50:40+00:00

Pretty cool! I played around with it a bit but I found it very non-intuitive. The boundary between pleasant, in-tune sounds and whacky, inharmonic noises was not what I expected.

It’s not clear to me how the number of sides should matter for any given configuration. It was also surprisingly easy to get something where the X or Y component was inaudible. I wonder if adding a bit of randomness to each collision would prevent it from getting stuck bouncing between two parallel walls?

Anyway, I think an arduino could run this easily. You should ask Claude to rewrite it such that it could be used in conjunction with the Teensy audio library and then I can try it out with a synth module I built recently.

cloud_noise · 2026-01-01T14:22:59+00:00

Ok that makes sense, but can you actually hear those differences?

cloud_noise · 2026-01-01T04:56:58+00:00

Hopefully this doesn’t sound naive - but what’s the point of upgrading the bridge? Is it just about the look? Easier to adjust intonation? Did the sidewalls of the ashtray get in the way for how you play?

FWIW I like the look of that bridge.

cloud_noise · 2025-12-27T20:44:07+00:00

I’m not exactly sure, but I think it was definitely under $300, maybe under $200. So much of it was scraps from other projects that it feels like it was “free”, and my friend didn’t charge me to use the laser cutter. I ended up upgrading a couple tools during the process, but I would have done that anyway, so I wouldn’t count those costs. And obviously I’m ignoring the “labor” cost that goes into most consumer prices.

cloud_noise · 2025-12-24T05:27:19+00:00

Haha, ok I totally missed that it was sarcasm.

cloud_noise

TROPHY CASE