Evening Tide - An Ambient Synth Improv (Blofeld, Specular Tempus, Arduino, reface CP)

Published on Mar 17, 2020 Lanthan O'Ide

"A relaxed jam session with FM electric piano sounds, spiced up up a little pitch bending thanks to a DIY-MIDI-controller.
Enjoy! ^^
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For those playing along at home:
The key is G major, the tempo is not fixed and changes during the track.
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For those interested in the wiring:
I'm using the reface CP only as a master keyboard this time. It sends its MIDI-signals to my custom MIDI controller, which passes them on to the Blofeld.
Said controller has an Arduino inside, and also has inputs for sustain and expression pedals. It also feeds MIDI signals to the Blofeld whenever I use the pedals.
In this case, it is translating an epression pedal to pitch bend commands.
This allows me to bend down my sounds without taking my hands of the keys! :D

...and the yellow lights show the position of the pedals, in case you are wondering.
The left one shows the sustain pedal, the four right ones the expression pedal. :)

Anyways, continuing with the setup description:
The audio from the Blofeld is passed through my trusty Specular Tempus, the output of the ST goes straight to my audio interface where it is recorded.
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For those interested in the sound design:
Yes, those are real fm sounds, in that they are created by a sine wave oscillator being frequency modulated.
The amount of frequency modulation is set by the filter envelope.

However, the modulating oscillator uses a wavetable. It is sort of pretending to be a sinewave oscillator that's being frequency modulated.
- which it has to, because the Blofeld doesn't have enough oscillators to emulate the 6 operators of a DX7 ;-)
By changing the position of the wavetable with velocity sensitivity, the overall sound changes dramatically, which allows for this patch to be played quite expressively."