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Synchro devlog 0

This post chronicles the background and rationale for my amateur development of Synchro, a digital phase modulation synthesizer. I haven’t yet finished Synchro; when I do, I’ll update this post accordingly.

Inception

Back in 2013, I was playing around with a demo copy of Native Instruments FM8. I found an interesting family of sounds produced by modulating a sine wave with one of the “Nth Formant” waveforms pitched several octaves down. The problem with FM8 is that each of these formant waveforms are discrete, and I wanted to blend between them. Also FM8 costs money, and I was a literal child with no income. lmao.

Advantage & Disadvantage

Back in 2019, I started working on a hack of D&D5 in order to address some of the common annoyances that arose during my playgroup at the time. One of those perceived annoyances was D&D5’s “advantage” and “disadvantage” mechanic. In that game, you normally roll one d20 to determine the outcome of a check, but various abilities, spells, conditions, and environmental factors can impose “advantage” or “disadvantage”. When making a check with either advantage or disadvantage, you instead roll twice, and take the higher (advantage) or lower (disadvantage) result from among them. My frustration with the mechanic at the time was that it couldn’t apply more than once. If five different sources all give you advantage, the implied narrative is that your chances of success are more likely, but mechanically it is exactly the same as receiving advantage once.

What happened to Cubiicle?

Several years ago I made a few songs collaboratively with an individual who at the time went by the alias “Cubiicle”, and who has since largely vanished from the internet. They also went by “Teramiiko” and “Tagwail” at some point. I just wanted to collect some of the information about the work we did together, since I will likely be remastering/reimagining those songs, and I have no way to properly credit them for their artistic talent.

Cubician II

Cubician II is finally live on all major streaming platforms: Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music, and many more. It is also available for download for free on Bandcamp.

This short album is entirely old music that I have taken time to polish up. Here’s some trivia about the songs:

Liquid Starlight

Liquid Starlight was originally uploaded to my old Soundcloud on 2014-03-01 (over a decade ago!). I originally created all the synthesizer sounds using ZynAddSubFX in LMMS, with liberal use of a specific parameter that allowed for randomization of different wave harmonics per-note. This helped each note sound slightly different, which helped the synth sound like water droplets. For the remake, I opted for a more tight and consistent sound.

CD Collection

I have been cultivating a growing collection of CDs. I don’t have a convenient CD player, so I’ve been ripping them and putting their music on my modded iPod Classic, as well as my own Jellyfin media server. But why?

I’ve grown increasingly frustrated as streaming services decline in quality while also increasing their subscription prices. Not only that, but streaming services pay virtually nothing to artists. I decided to start collecting CDs and listening to music I enjoy on my iPod, free from algorithms and suggested content. Purchasing CDs is a legitimate way to financially support the artists as well (for artists that don’t offer CDs, Bandcamp gives artists a more reasonable cut).