RLPF.ar

Yes, those.

Here's an idea -- why don't I give my first-year students a really strange synthesizer sound and ask them to make some musical sense out of it? A challenge, and an invitation to think about the raw materials of music, instead of just cranking out yet another clichéd piano-bass-and-drums pop song.

It seemed like a good idea at the time...

I first thought of FM (frequency modulation) synthesis. It's a really cheap way to get complex inharmonic spectra (electronic-music-speak for sounds with pitch relationships that aren't even -- a violin has even relationships and sounds nicely pitched, while a bell has some out of tune relationships and sounds metallic). It would be a piece of cake in SuperCollider, 20-30 minutes at most.

But my students need to work in a sequencer, so it has to be a VST (virtual studio technology) plugin. That's where the trouble begins: every VST designer has a different idea of what should and shouldn't be possible, and they have no compunction about imposing that on users. It's a far cry from the open architecture I'm used to.

So let's take a little tour. I won't even bother with the links; none of this is worth the heartache. (But all the online reviews say, "Best plugin ever!")

• Oxe FM: Excellent FM, easy to build really complex sounds (though the filter section is garbage). What's wrong with it? It doesn't save your settings into the project file like every other plugin. It keeps them in a disk file -- hard to move patches from one machine to another. Even worse, the file location is in the registry and in Windows 7, you have to be an administrator to get to the registry key. In other words, we have another loser Windows developer who didn't get the memo about how bad, evil, wrong and last-century it is to require admin access to run non-admin software! Fail, fail, fail.
• FMMF: The amount of modulation that's permitted is pitifully weak. Boring sounds.
• Adonis: Seems to have some signal-processing heft, but... there's no easy way to have a different envelope for different oscillators. Huh? Even the earliest Yamaha FM synthesizers back in the 80s could do that.

After wasting a few hours with that, I had to punt and use something in an analog-style plugin that they called "frequency modulation," but isn't controlled in the same way and sounds unlike any other FM I've heard before.

I could rehash my usual boilerplate text about how bad closed-source software is, but others have said it better and I'm up at 6 AM tomorrow, no time for that. It's just that every so often, it comes home in a really direct, practical way that using closed software means voluntarily limiting yourself to what somebody else thinks you should be able to do. It's all fun and games if your interests line up with the programmer's; if they don't, or if the programmer didn't have the foresight to recognize off-the-beaten-track potential, you're screwed and it hurts.

I saw a clip on a Web forum about using Linux: "Because I would rather own a free operating system than steal one that isn't worth paying for." I live in a country where it's exactly reversed. Friction is inevitable.