Making a Bad Sine Wave in Pure Data Vanilla (Lo-Fi Oscillator with FM & Feedback) | Simon Hutchinson

Building a "wab-sabi" oscillator in Pd to celebrate the beauty of imperfection and impermanence.
Sine waves are great! The perfection of a pure, single frequency can be both expressively and technically very useful in pursuing our musical goals. There are, however, lots of musical reasons that we might want to intentionally make our oscillators a little more rough around the edges.
Performance on traditional, acoustic instruments, of course, produces a huge amount of micro-variation across each note, and so it can be expressively engaging for us to be able to introduce that same imperfection (analog warmth?) in our digital instruments as well.
In this video, I build a bad sine wave by frequency-modulating my oscillator with noise, and then feeding back the output back into the modulation. While I build this out in Pure Data, the same can be done in Reaktor, Kyma, Max/MSP or any other synthesis environment.
More Pd Tutorials here: kzbin.info/aero/PL7w4cOVVxL6FB_mmJ77C6fdV8G6L4zDut
No-talking Pure Data jams and patch-from-scratch: kzbin.info/aero/PL7w4cOVVxL6ESr9SuBYJARJkETfp12Dp3
0:00 Introduction, The Beauty of Imperfection
1:26 Slider-Controlled Sine Wave
3:28 Adding Noise
4:35 Frequency Modulating with Noise
7:24 Filtering the Noise
8:20 Feeding Back into FM
9:55 I've gone too far
13:26 Reaktor Examples
14:18 Closing Thoughts, Next Steps
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#PureData #SoundSynthesis #SoundDesign #ExperimentalMusic #sinewave #oscillator

[@devinandrews2346]

Very nice! I never would've imagined you could get such thick saturation from a relatively simple patch.

[@SimonHutchinson]

Thanks! Right? It works surprisingly well. (Of course, the secret behind these videos is that I try like 50 things that don't work before I find the thing that does... I just don't make videos about the other 50 things!)

[@Cupofcofy]

This video is extremely inspiring!

[@SimonHutchinson]

Always great to hear that!

[@dankro279]

Very nice. What I did not fancy that much is that the badness factor is also dependent on the frequency itself. So lower frequencies are not affected that much as higher frequencies. I would prefer a more equally balanced badness. How would you do that?

[@SimonHutchinson]

Really? I love the nonlinearity of it! It gives it a bit more analog "realness". That said, it'd be pretty easy to make the "badness" more uniform across the range, but you'd likely have to approach it in a different way. Maybe more like mixing the noise instead of FM.

[@Thawney]

This is such a cool video and you are absolutely my favourite youtuber at the moment!! One question, at the end you got it to work on eurorack. How do you port your patches to eurorack? Ive been using the daisy by electrosmith but I would love to learn other ways!

[@SimonHutchinson]

Thanks for your message! It's not actually a port. It's a reconstruction of the idea on Eurorack. So I take the concept of the patch, and then implement it with the analog equipment in Eurorack. An oscillator is an oscillator, FM is FM. So while Pd, Eurorack, Reaktor, or Kyma will all probably sound a little different, understanding the fundamentals allow me to work within any system.

[@Thawney]

@@SimonHutchinson Oh I see!! I misunderstood, thanks so much for explaining :) have a lovely day!

[@dizzeep2023]

I didn’t know about the Electrosmith Daisy yet. Thanks for mentioning it :)

[@_DRMR_]

Simple but effective! Will have to remember to add a "badness' factor to my upcoming HVCC synth plugins ;) Btw why not just set the slider from `0 -1` instead of `0 - 100` and then multiplying with `0.01`?

[@SimonHutchinson]

Thanks! Fair question about the slider values... I'm not completely sure off the top of my head where I picked up that habit (or if it's justifiable at all). Let me think on that.

[@jrkirby93]

I was expecting a bit of tube distortion on top of the FM

[@SimonHutchinson]

Could definitely go there! See here for a Pure Data "soft clipping" expression - www.reddit.com/r/puredata/comments/qtzt5s/how_to_implement_x_13_x3_soft_clipper/