Just started doing music a month or two back. Fun, but a bit hard. Started using hookpad which is great for a newbie like me. But a bit limited so I started playing around with FL studio. It is extremely hard
Being the dev I am, I’ve started coding a new lightweight DAW and a synth VST. Both are free. But I don’t want to start by doing ads. I do, however, really appreciate it if anyone was interested in trying them out, I’m kinda stumbling forward
lol. No, I’m not a bot. I just love coding, and music is a new passion.
You can learn music theory, read papers about synths, there is lots of blog posts about synth parameters etc.
But that’s just it. I might be able to understand and implement the theory, but that doesn’t actually tell if its good or not. And since I’m not that experienced I would appricate same honest feedback.
But as you say yourself, it’s quite difficult to join a new community, ask for feedback without it being flagged as AI or spam.
that’s why I wrote as I did and my intention was just to start reading your posts.
yes! That’s the hardest part in the synth. I’ve spent plenty if time trying to get the sound to sound more alive and evolve over time. imho thats f*cking hard.
haha. yes. I’m a bit crazy. But I’ve been coding for 20 years and also have it as a hobby. I’ve spent obscene amount of time doing it. I run my own solo dev consulting firm.
And I’m also quite honest. Some things in the DAW is quite poor and I’ve coded some features that doesnt make sense. But you know. Friday nights after a few beers I get “creative”
Another update. imho the UI is starting to look OK, or what do you think?
Kiwisynth’s four LFOs are now tempo-sync per-LFO,
and there’s a new drawable single-cycle amplitude shaper on the FX
bus that also locks to any division, so custom-shape
modulation (1/16 against 1/16T) and triplet-grid stutter patterns
are in the box without scripting
Any chance of a Linux build in the future? I’d seriously love to help out with making this better, if I can in any way, or at least test-drive some features, but I quit Windoze cold turkey a few months ago. If you do decide to go this route at all, I’m seriously interested in checking it out and making some wild scripts for it. I really dig the look of things so far, too.
I also added a master mixer that also does spectrum analysis, so it automatically harmonizes tracks. For instance, so that the lead track doesn’t produce too much bass, so that the bass track doesn’t get muddy.
Can’t wait to check this out; a lot of DAWs sort of skip out on the modulation, so being able to sort of ‘Formula control’ the values with BASIC-like syntax sounds cool as hell.
Are you planning anything similar to piano roll / note-plotting scripting? I’d also love to see this evolve into real-time note and event generation, if that’s on the roadmap at all. You might really have something unique going on here where others sort of fall short or don’t fully-develop ideas. Bespoke is a close contender, but I don’t even think you can manipulate modulation very easily (something that seems trivial to a lot of us), so you’re off to a good start from what I can tell.
Almost done. The scripting was in Kiwisynth (which also is bundled in Kiwisonic, the DAW). But I had a few beers yesterday and came up with two ideas for scripting in the DAW too.
One is to be able to do mastering with script, like analyzing tracks etc. Well, that was the goal, we’ll see how it turns out.
The other is to build note generators. Kiwisonic has different music theory analyzers that can be used in that generation.
The “Harmonize” button plays your song, analyzes all tracks, and then adjusts the EQ per track.
The drum machine was a single track, but I’ve just changed so that you can for instance pull the kick into a seperate track to bass boost it (as in the screenshot). There are two equalizers in the effect chain. One three-band for beginners and one eight-band.
But I’ve been coding for 20 years and also have it as a hobby. I’ve spent obscene amount of time doing it. I run my own solo dev consulting firm.
