At the beginning i didn’t think too much about how and when i was going to release something. At first it seemed like an option to sell the synth for a few bucks and maybe even make some out of it. However, reading some posts on KVR Forums written by serious professionals, convinced me of the fact that making profit out of plugins as an independent developer is very difficult. So, freeware it is, less business – more pleasure!
DSP horror
So i started playing around with a bunch of sawtooths and it sounded quite horrible. I’m not a DSP-guru of any sort and had the bitter sweet sensation of learning about aliasing the hard way. I learnt what it takes to generate better sound, but even the simplest thing such as generating a sawtooth waveform became complicated as hell. Later i learnt that unintended noise, distortion and aliasing lurk everywhere in audio DSP, just waiting to drive a poor engineer insane.
Why a synth plugin?
Frankly, i’m an electronic music enthusiast who’s been making noise out of computers all his life. I’ve been fascinated by the math behind sound and music. I’m also fairly experienced programmer. So, here we go.
A few months back, i had a good deal of audio plugin code lying around, a couple of hobby projects that i never got round to finish. They weren’t really made to be published, but the fact that i never released any of that work was kind of irritating, so i decided to put a synth plugin together.
I’ve always thought of Roland Juno-106 as the ultimate music making machine of all times. It’s just so inspiring to tweak and it’s next to impossible to spend more than five minutes on a 106 without cracking a laugh or two. A 106 can produce quite impressive screeks and screams when mishandled correctly. So i got some inspiration from that gem of synth hardware.