Dolphin bassline

size 0.59 MB / 0.61 MB

This little monophonic synth is a proof-of-concept toy inspired by a well-known silverbox from the early 1980s. Emphasis is on “inspired” as calling it a model would be something between a joke and a lie. It should still do techno.
It has an oscillator, which you can ask to output either saw-waves or square-waves. The output of the oscillators goes into a variable frequency filter with optional resonance. Finally the output of the filter is multiplied by a slow, fixed-time envelope. Tweaking the knobs is suggested.
The oscillator will simply track the latest MIDI note-on message, so you’ll probably want to sequence it. MIDI note-off messages matching the current note will gate the amplitude envelope. Overlapped notes won’t retrigger the envelopes, and will cause the oscillator to slide to the new pitch. Notes with high velocity (about 101 and up) will trigger “accents” (these can be sliding notes too, or even half-way through the same note if you manage to convince your host not to send note-off in the middle), which will temporarily set the filter envelope timing to minimum and depending on the accent knob (and for slides also the remaining level of the filter envelope) boost volume and cutoff a bit (but see here).
Other than the tuning and accent knobs, the rest of the knobs conspire to modify the behaviour of the filter in somewhat chaotic way. In theory the cutoff will manually change the cutoff, the resonance will improve the filter quality factor, the env mod will control how much the filter envelope modifies the cutoff and the decay will change the decay time of the filter envelope.