Resonarium: Free Open Source Waveguide Synthesizer

[00:00:00] Yo, folks, welcome back today. It's about this free or open source synthesizer called Resonarium or
[00:00:06] Resonarium how it's pronounced in Germany and it's like I said completely open source synthesizer
[00:00:13] There's a link in the description below to this github page so you can just download here. Maybe the
[00:00:18] binary for
[00:00:21] Windows and Mac OS and maybe you can download the source code and you can build it for yourself on linux
[00:00:29] It's
[00:00:30] The GPL 3.0 license. It looks very good, but it's also very alpha
[00:00:35] But the version here it says it's 0.0.1 so expect a lot of bucks and you know
[00:00:41] Kind of odd behavior
[00:00:43] It also gives you here some kind of caution warning the sounds produced by waveguide modeling can be unpredictable
[00:00:49] So it's basically all based around resonators and feedback and you get sometimes screechy sounds and so on
[00:00:56] So it's in a very early state and it also when you open up here the VST. It gives you a warning protect your ears. I
[00:01:03] Understand I have taken appropriate action. Okay, so we do basically here
[00:01:09] peak limiter
[00:01:11] after the
[00:01:13] device minus 1 dB, okay
[00:01:15] So this is how it looks like in my opinion. It looks very nice and it works very in a very straightforward manner
[00:01:24] So if you know how
[00:01:26] Physical modeling works or waveguide synthesis works. It's basically built upon this concept. So on the left side we have some
[00:01:34] Impulses or sound sources. We have here impulse exciter. You can activate this or we have a noise exciter or sequence exciter
[00:01:43] Or we can use a sample if you want to or we can use external input
[00:01:48] So you can feed in audio signals into this synthesizer
[00:01:51] so here I'm going just for impulse exciter and this one gives us some kind of
[00:01:57] Dirac signal or just a very short burst or even crackle or snap
[00:02:04] I don't know how to call it a very short sound burst and then we feed this into the first waveguide tap here and
[00:02:11] each waveguide tap has eight resonators as you can see here and
[00:02:18] each resonator has different options and is also
[00:02:22] built out of
[00:02:25] one, two, three filters, I would say that's that's the structure and then we go here of course into an
[00:02:33] Post FX section and we have some modulation sources down here. So it's a very straightforward
[00:02:40] Structure of the synthesizer, so let's listen to this here
[00:02:45] So we have now here an impulse and we go into one
[00:02:49] One resonator and we have key track
[00:02:53] We have pitch so we can offset basically the key track or we can disable the key track here and just dial in a Hertz
[00:02:59] Fixed frequency, but we go for for key tracking here and then we have pitch
[00:03:05] So there's a semitones. We can also disable this and then it's basically ratio
[00:03:09] So this is one times the frequency. This is you know two times the frequency and so on
[00:03:15] So two times the frequency is basically one octave higher
[00:03:18] So let's go back to zero here. So this is one resonator
[00:03:21] And then it's here decay and this is more or less like feedback
[00:03:26] So with zero decay, we can basically hear the exciter signal
[00:03:31] You can change the density of the exciting signal
[00:03:35] And of course we can filter this here additionally also with the filter
[00:03:43] So you can go into the first resonator here and we tune up the decay
[00:03:48] This is like a normal just delay with the feedback and then we can dial in here dispersion
[00:03:59] Which is more or less like how frequencies travel
[00:04:02] through the strings
[00:04:04] If you want to call it this way, but it's more or less like the overtones or the tune from the root
[00:04:10] So the overtones are basically yeah offset in a slightly manner
[00:04:24] Then we have a second filter here
[00:04:27] Which is called loop filter
[00:04:30] So you can also key track this or keep here this at the fixed frequency
[00:04:39] So it's basically a low pass filter with the resonance, which is also just feedback
[00:04:44] You can also switch this to a band pass
[00:04:50] And you can also enable here key tracking so then cut off here is not fixed frequencies anymore
[00:05:02] It's just in semitones so we can also offset here this by a certain amount or just keep it at the root position
[00:05:10] So the key tracking is basically when I when you play different notes on the keyboard
[00:05:16] It's the frequency of the filter goes up or down accordingly to the note
[00:05:20] You can already hear it sounds very in tune
[00:05:26] Let's go to 12 maybe here like this
[00:05:42] You get some overtones there and then at the end we have another post filter
[00:05:53] Which can also be key tracked here. There's a cutoff frequency
[00:05:57] There's also resonance, which is the feedback and here
[00:06:02] There's no mode in terms of low pass band pass and high pass here
[00:06:06] It's kind of a number and I'm not sure what exactly does this does
[00:06:11] Maybe you go from a low pass to a high pass over a band pass or maybe it's like a peak
[00:06:18] thing where you just you know
[00:06:22] Do certain type of high pass and you do a resonance at the certain frequency?
[00:06:28] I have no idea what exactly this mode does here
[00:06:31] There's also no description and by the way, you can hover over some of these knobs here and you can see there's an help
[00:06:38] So this is here set the gain of the input signal of the waveguide bank
[00:06:42] And you get some helps here help functions there what everything means
[00:06:51] So, yeah, that's pretty pretty nice to have I don't think there's an Emanuel at the moment
[00:06:56] But like I said, it's an alpha and see this here. It's an alpha and by the way, we can also resize this here
[00:07:03] Do it Lee nice
[00:07:06] So this is the first resonator we can also use multiple resonators with different different settings
[00:07:19] Just mix it in so we have this and this in parallel and
[00:07:22] You can also switch here on the right side from parallel to interlinked and to cascade and interlinked it says here
[00:07:30] It means
[00:07:32] Interlink mode the output of all resonators is fed into the input of each resonator
[00:07:38] so every resonator feeds into every other resonator and
[00:07:43] Yeah, it's like I said, it's just a filter basically then we have cascade and it says here
[00:07:50] The output of the end resonator is fed into the input of the n plus one resonator
[00:07:57] So for me, it sounds like this resonator output goes into this resonator
[00:08:02] And then it goes into this into this into this and this is and so on so it's basically cascade and
[00:08:06] You can filter and filter and filter down until you end up with a nice signal
[00:08:13] also
[00:08:16] Problem I have here with this at the moment is that it uses a lot of CPU when I use multiple of these resonators or waveguides and
[00:08:23] By the way, these settings here also just for one tap
[00:08:28] So you can say here the coupling is cascade and here it's been parallel and then you have here a mix knob
[00:08:35] That says mix between the exciter signal and the previous waveguide
[00:08:40] Which means you can take the output of this waveguide tap and bring it into this tab here and
[00:08:47] You can say at zero we get only the impulse exciter here signal and at 100% or one
[00:08:55] Yeah, it's 100%
[00:08:58] You get not this signal anymore. You get the signal from the waveguide one output tap, okay?
[00:09:06] so you can make it very complicated and
[00:09:10] nested in a way
[00:09:12] Make another one here
[00:09:17] This cascade let's go back to parallel
[00:09:24] Disable this one
[00:09:30] Go to band pass here
[00:09:34] Oh
[00:09:36] Maybe let's go to seven. Oh, what does the wrong thing? Yeah, let's go to seven here
[00:09:52] You have to play around
[00:10:15] So you can play around with this and get different harmonics out of all of these resonators and play around with it
[00:10:39] I don't want to go too deep into this. I'm just playing around for two hours and they end up in so many different places
[00:10:46] We have also here some modulators in there
[00:10:50] Maybe you don't need it in bitwig because you can just attach modulators on the device itself
[00:10:55] But you can also just use here the envelope
[00:11:00] Enable this maybe, you know, just drag it onto this and you can change the strength there
[00:11:06] So
[00:11:08] You can do this we can use an msec one msec two a lot of modulation sources. There's also a matrix down here
[00:11:32] So like I said very straightforward, then we go from the output of these waveguides here straight strict or straight into
[00:11:40] Post fx section. We have filters. We have corals
[00:11:44] phaser distortion delay
[00:11:47] Also time synced here
[00:11:54] Compressor reverb, probably not the best reverb, but you can use it
[00:12:20] Yeah, also a second filter here and some global options pulley fx, it's interesting
[00:12:28] So you have like for every voice or when you play multiple notes
[00:12:31] You have then and post fx for every note separately or just one
[00:12:38] For every of all the notes at once the gain knob has some problems in my opinion
[00:12:48] Yeah, I ran into many issues just using this here when I use multiple resonators for some reason
[00:12:55] We can also reduce the voices here from 16 voices to one voice. I don't know if this actually works
[00:13:00] So, yeah, this is basically the synthesizer
[00:13:04] It it sounds very good it kind of works but there are some bugs here and there and there are also some some nice presets here
[00:13:15] Yeah, I also wanted to show you here the other noise sources. So this is the noise exciter
[00:13:34] This is probably what you want to use if you want to make bad sounds
[00:13:38] So I have like a longer noise type of sound
[00:13:45] And also filter this down
[00:13:47] If you want to make flute sounds or trumpets or stuff like this you probably want to use here the noise exciter
[00:13:54] And we have something like a sequence exciter here
[00:14:08] [Music]
[00:14:37] So you can shape the
[00:14:39] The sound or the impulse here in every kind of way and like I said, you can also use a sample here
[00:14:46] I haven't tried this out yet, but I just want to show you the synthesizer
[00:14:50] Because it's completely free and open source. So why not show it, right?
[00:14:55] But like I said use it with caution. It's in alpha very buggy use it on your own. Yeah
[00:15:03] Be cautious the link is in the description below. Thanks for watching leave a like
[00:15:08] Let me know what you think in the comments down below and I'll see you in the next video. Bye