scup, aka porgy
By wangus on February 15, 2026 9:30 pm
dub wub
i just wanted to make something dubby. i need practice. i feel like i def sharpened some skills on FM wubs, but didn't build much on the drums side of things. They work OK enough here, but it's not anything special. dunno how to navigate the layers and patterns well yet.
everything is M8 synthesized, mostly FM.
the snare came out pretty neat i think. the approach was A>B+C+D algo, started with op D with NBP noise bandpass. with high resonance and some fast ratio modulation, i could get both a snare body hit and an airy tail from the single op. then 3 more operators gave a lot of room to flesh it out.
re: the wubs: one key learning was modulating operators with separate (same-rate) LFOs, with a phase offset between them. it can just hit harder, more character, with the skewed interaction between the modulations. and you can get especially interesting variations by tweaking the rate of just one of them. also, table modulation of operator ratio can be neat. regular LFO doesn't work great because the pitch goes atonal, but you can table modulate to harmonic steps. that's what's going on in the middle variation section.
another m8 sound design hack: you probably know about making chords with the FM synth, where you put a different MOD to each one's pitch, so you can have 4-note chords in one track. but that limits timbre options (one operator per voice). but if you sacrifice 1 voice, you can have one modulator on the top note of the chord (A>B+C+D). and that can trick the ear, if it's fast it sounds like 3 full voices, even though the lower two don't have modulators.
anyway, a pretty quick week this one. some good practice, not a deep track overall, but fun.
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some more post-thoughts
the fluttery blip wash was fun to make. i programmed 15 steps in a table, then futzed around shifting octaves of steps until it sounded like a loop (initial pass involuntarily had some overall contour, so it felt like a jump when it looped to the start). then on another track in the table, i had a different-length loop of MULT modulation (wavesynth). so that adds harmonic stepping on top. and some interesting interactions came out.
makes me think of kursa stuff. esp. waerbl.
the final chords are FM, though they sound very flutelike (think macrosynth). the blown timbre comes from a NBP operator with mid-high resonance, tuned to unison with the proper oscillators. the m8 engine tracks the filter reasonably to note.
you wouldn't notice unless you had an exceptional ear, but the chords are a bespoke intonation. i solo'd the top and bottom voices of the chords, and finetuned the upper voice's scale notes in order. the inner voices use the same tuning, and it worked out to a coherent intonation.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
