The Pentaphone | Hacker News Reader

The Pentaphone

billgathen.github.io

41 pointssubnaught6 comments

Most online synth examples are too complicated: they try to give you everything

Totally.

but you can make a bunch of music using only a subset of

Waveforms? Filters? Oscillators? Envelopes? Yeah... synths are totally complicated. I'm excited to see how you're going to make it simpler.

the 12 available notes. The Pentaphone limits itself to just those heavy-hitters.

NOOOOOOO!!!!! Talk to every guitar player; this is the path to purgatory.

Edit: I've warmed; it's pretty fun and I could see this turning people on to improvising. The "8" (next tonic) would be sweet. Maybe shift to raise the whole thing an octave? Proper face melting requires access to two tonics...

I recently used the web audio API and HTML5 to make a touchscreen-enabled synth app for iPad.

Its very basic, but keeping in mind its around 150 lines and written from scratch Im sure I can improve it from here :)

http://codepen.io/tomhodgins/post/building-an-html5-app-for-...

Interesting - played around with it but the sound is choppy and crackles between key preses on my computer. I'm thinking it's my audio setup (AMD Radeon 6770 graphics card feeding an Onkyo 5.1 receiver both graphics and audio over HDMI with the default AMD audio drivers), will try later elsewhere.

I think pressing 'i' to change bit rate from 8-bit helps with the crackling. I didn't get visual feedback that the bit rate was changing (bug?) but I similarly didn't get visual feedback when I changed instruments with 'u', though the instrument clearly changed.

"8-bit" and "Organ" are two mutually exclusive options, you can switch between them by using 'i' and 'u' respectively.

I love it. Some people with a musical background might find it to limited. But I think it's good to explore and play.

I think I should get a Push, Monome, or Launchpad some time. Today I had a demonstration of the Push, and it's so simple to play around with samples and sounds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com