iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yeah I spent the winter thinking about a super direct fm synth (check out my posts for six sines) and it was super useful precisely because it was just the algorithm on the front panel (although it was a pretty hairy algorithm with all the choices). Sometimes maximal is bad. But surge is fun!

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Haha. The example I use a bit less in the extreme is the mini moog which is fixed architecture small knob count and amazing. It is a wonderfully designed instrument. But it fails the sense of being “powerful” that was meant here I think. It’s not even polyphonic!

Yeah more than a bit even! About 45 people have added code and there’s another big group of designers and testers involved. But indeed it all starts with that act of generosity from claes, who went on to start bitwig and continues to run a very open source friendly company!

I would say powerful in this context means: lots of features so there’s lots of sonic space available, with lots of configuration and modulation so you can push it around in lots of ways, and those features by and large sound good and are fairly efficient. That maximalist design has downsides tho

(If you haven’t watched surge has a patch which recreates Steve reich piano phase if you hold a key and benn kept releasing the key before the first phase while the surge team went nooooooo in the comments for about 10 minutes)

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 19/03/2025

Heya Benn. Thanks for highlighting surge and also for holding the Reich key for 30 seconds! The video is misnamed [SerumXT]. Would really be lovely if you could fix that to [SurgeXT] and then we can share it more broadly in the surge community without confusion.

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I'm gonna start referring to theist 600 years of western music as 'the post monophonic era'

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Thanks for the kind words! I'm happy for a mix of free and paid synths to flourish, and love loads of closed source products - i don't think I finish a track without pianotec and valhalla - but am also happy that theres good free and open source audio software available also!

Serum is amazing - I was just making a joke about the synth mindshare today. Six sines is neat but is not a comparable product of course!

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Also: fun fact - Prokofiev died the same day as Stalin so literally no-one knew for a while. I often think about that when faced with situations like a version bump on my little fm synth the same day as serum 2 releases.

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Happy to release v1.1.0 of Six sines today, with many new features, fixes, and improvements. The release is here: github.com/baconpaul/si... and change log is github.com/baconpaul/si... Enjoy!

Release Release v1.1.0 · baconpaul/six-sines

The 1.1.0 release was released Tue Mar 18 13:57:50 UTC 2025 You can read changes from 1.0 here Enjoy!

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 16/03/2025

Fonts, hdpi on winlin and accessible interface seem like they are hard. are you tackling those?

baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 22/02/2025

Thanks and I’m glad it’s useful. Several people have worked on the wrapper not just me. None of the projects I work on have dollar sponsorships or patreons. Bug reports, code and documentation improvements, and testing are welcome contributions though!

baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 22/02/2025

Hey a bit more technical but we released v0.12.0 of the clap wrapper today which lets you write a clap and get a vst3 auv2 and standalone for free. Thanks to all the six sines users who didn’t know they were testers. Chuckle. Changelog here github.com/free-audio/c...

Wrappers for using CLAP in other plugin environments - free-audio/clap-wrapper

ChangeLog

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 22/02/2025

So you don’t want to by my etherwave then Chris? It goes great with my seaboard!

baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 19/02/2025

Pushed a bunch of performance improvements to six sines for core cases this weekend and early this week. Things like "if your attack parameter hasn't changed you don't need to recalculate dphase in the envelope" and "if you don't use the lfo dont run the lfo". But makes a big difference often!

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 16/02/2025

Ha yeah well you know. it will be done very soon. The requests are getting less frequent and the bugs are getting closed. And big swaths of the work aren't in six sines anyway they are in the underlying libraries. Like today when we found a directx/focusrite/juce8/windows10 conflict. (ugh)

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 16/02/2025

Loads of great suggestions from the KVR One Synth challenge on Six Sines. But the feature I'm most excited about came from someone asking what type of FM it does (the answer is: it did PM). And then I added this to each node. If you want to understand PM vs AM vs Lin or Exp FM, it's really handy!

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 07/02/2025

Wow loads of great feedback and bug reports from first five days of one synth challenge. Can’t wait to see the tracks!

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 03/02/2025

Band camp is up and we have free streaming set up there I think leeward.bandcamp.com/album/all-we...

leeward.bandcamp.com

All We Know, by Leeward.

2 track album

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 03/02/2025

Since I know followers here are mostly synth and music tech folks: whole thing impossible with out @valhalladsp.bsky.social of course, modartt pianotec and surge on the second track, Arturia farisa on the first. The guitars and basses are all guitars and basses!

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 03/02/2025

My band, leeward, released a new 2 song ep today, “all we know”. A contemplative pair of songs written last November and December. Hope you enjoy if you choose to listen! open.spotify.com/album/4s0NIh...

open.spotify.com

All We Know

Leeward. · EP · 2025 · 2 songs

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 01/02/2025

Oh exciting! Six sines is the February one synth challenge synth. You can actually win prizes by making a track with six sines! Rules and details here www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewto...

kvraudio.com

KVR Forum: One Synth Challenge #192: Six Sines by BaconPaul - Instruments Forum

KVR Audio Forum - One Synth Challenge #192: Six Sines by BaconPaul - Instruments Forum

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Yeah exactly. I decided I’d rather write code and songs than blog posts after giving it a bit of thought.

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So I was listening to junta over the weekend which admittedly is super early phish but the song structure reminded me way more of mid period Zappa than the dead yeah. But remember my real point was no one wants these hot takes :)

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But also I’m curious if people would read about developing synths in general. I dunno. It seems pretty niche and I could just write code instead.

baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 27/01/2025

It’s funny I thought about resetting baconpaul.org to be more of a place where I write about music and music tech, but then realized that there’s too much shouting into that void, so instead post snippets here. I don’t think the world needs my analysis of why phish is more Zappa than dead

baconpaul.org

BaconPaul.org

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Six Sines 1.0.4. github.com/baconpaul/si... Fixes a problem where VST3 hosts with note id support could, in some cases, result in stuck notes on unison legato patches in the synth. Recommend all cubase and S1 users upgrade, and all bitwig users continue to prefer CLAP version.

Release Release v1.0.4 · baconpaul/six-sines

Release updated Mon Jan 27 16:56:29 UTC 2025 a9b5a0f : Prep 1.0.4 5b84f16 : Deactivate note off note id matching c6dbb43 : Stage for 1.0.3 3f7df19 : Notify clap host to rescan values on patch loa...

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 27/01/2025

Hey thanks for the great article! Hope you enjoy the synth.

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 25/01/2025

I made that bug sound scarier than it is I realize. The parameters are applied to the engine and the UI. It's just a host-param-view display (so like the bitwig gutter device) which could go stale in some cases. Found the bug in sapphire first! Also free synths are great tester recruitment tools :)

baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 25/01/2025

Six Sines 1.0.3 is out, with a bug fix that could in some circumstances cause the host to not refresh parameters on a patch load. Recommend all users upgrade to 1.0.3 or the latest nightly. github.com/baconpaul/si...

Release Release v1.0.3 · baconpaul/six-sines

Release updated Sat Jan 25 17:55:34 UTC 2025 c6dbb43 : Stage for 1.0.3 3f7df19 : Notify clap host to rescan values on patch load c087dd7 : Move cmakelists to 1.0.2 0bc5b34 : Dockerize (#155) 55ea...

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 24/01/2025

The alias supression techniques available to you are limited

baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 24/01/2025

Exciting new port of the vcv rack sapphire modules to a daw environment, using many of the lessons learned in making six sines. Have fun with these crazy physical modeling effects community.vcvrack.com/t/sapphire-f...

community.vcvrack.com

Sapphire for the DAW in beta test

Paul (@baconpaul) and I are pleased to release an open source DAW plugin using four of my Sapphire modules. This project takes Elastika, Tube Unit, Gravy and Galaxy from Sapphire and makes them avail...

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 24/01/2025

If you have a cmake based workflow generating Linux binaries in GitHub actions it may be Since Linux doesn’t really exist you kinda have to build a machine and hope it’s linuxy enough for other people to use the binary. That’s what our docker does We have a u18 and u20 version.

Another fun different thing will be ready I think in next 24 hours…. Stay tuned

If you have questions hmu on surge discord but the docker files for the images and the actions are all mit licensed files in GitHub/surge-synthesizer repos

If you use public GitHub actions we have our docker image all set up and ready to go. The six sines actions file shows you how to use it and I unrestricted it to not just be for surge this week

Fixed in 1.0.2 and nightly

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 22/01/2025

Six Sines 1.0.2 is out. It is identical to 1.0.1 except the Linux build is built in an docker container so an annoying glibc issue (that makes Linux generally infuriating) goes away, and the macOS minimum goes up to 10.14 rather than 10.13 for a couple of reasons. github.com/baconpaul/si...

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github.com/baconpaul/ai... Make sure to use at least f3db8 binary of airwin. Basically GitHub upgraded to ub24, Linux doesn’t exist, and I hadn’t rolled out the surge docker trick to the edge properties yet but have to airwin now

Release DAWPlugin · baconpaul/airwin2rack

Release updated Mon Jan 20 14:01:46 UTC 2025 f3b8ba8 : Move Linux Plugin to a U20 docker build (#178) 389462a : Update build-daw-plugin.yml for u24 9f1abee : Update to Latest Airwin cdd3263 : Upd...

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baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 22/01/2025

The current air windows consolidated for fixed a day or two ago For six sines for now just self build on Linux until I apply the same fix

baconpaul @baconpaul.org · 22/01/2025

Six Sines 1.0.1 out. This fixes a bug where, in rare cases, envelopes could get some envelope times wrong. It also brings macOS minimum version to 10.13, back from 10.15. Nightly still has new stuff, but 1.0.1 is stable github.com/baconpaul/si...