Ref / Hz.Plugins / Hz.Syntho

Wherein we present Hz.Syntho - a curiously configurable synthesizer.
Right-click to navigate sections.

Intro

Hz.Syntho is a configurable, polyphonic synthesizer. Each voice sports up to 3 oscillators, 4 lfos, 2 filters, 2 envelopes and 3 mixers. These can be dynamically routed in a modular style. A shared reverb unit can also be enabled to round out the final sound. Additional global effects can be added by routing the output of Hz.Syntho to your favorite effects plugin(s).

Hz.Syntho comes with several presets so you can explore its possibiities quickly. The oscillators support custom wavetables and so the sounds you can produce are virtually unlimited.

WebGUI

At the top of an Hz.Sytho panel are 4 controls:

download: syncs parameters from host
upload: sends parameters to host
bookmark: param presets menu
schema: graph presets menu

Modular Routing with Dot Notation

Signal routing in Hz.Syntho is configured symbolically using dot notation and the resulting network can be visualized in the WebGUI as seed below.

digraph
{
    osc1 -> mix1 -> out;
    osc2 -> filt1 -> mix1;
    lfo1 -> filt1 [label="to Resonance", remap_bipolar=1, remap_scale=.2];
    adsr1 -> mix1 [label="to 1"];
}

As seen above, default signal routing is trivial, just issue statements of the form srcnode -> sinknode ... ;, where the available nodes are:

NB: reverb can't be referred to in the digraph since it is applied to the combined polyphonic output. You can, however, refer to its parameters as desribed below.

You can route the output of a node to a parameter or side-chain audio port by providing the label attribute on the sink node as shown above with to Resonance and to 1. Finally, when routing to a parameter you can remap the upstream output by including one or more remap values:

Parameters

Since Syntho plays the role of orchestrating the interplay between modules, all parameters reside within each module's namespace. The exception to the rule are the preset parameters described next.

Module parameter names are found for each module and you can fully-qualify their names for syntho.SetParam() by prepending the module name like so: /mix1/Gain.

Here are links to the parameter tables for Syntho's modules:

mix, osc, adsr, env, lfo, filt, reverb

NB: ignore submodule parameters within some of these pages as they are superceded by the Samplo's modules.

Presets

Note that Syntho always operates from a worklist and until you provide it with one, it will use the builtin or initial value. To support the live updates to the dotgraph, the GUI periodically updates Syntho with a new worklist. If you don't use the GUI, here's how to produce one. Note that this requires

const wl = Agraph.SynthoWorklist(yourdot, syntho); 
await syntho.LoadPreset({_worklist: wl});

In addition to these special preset parameters, normal module parameters can also be initialized via the Syntho.constructor preset or its LoadPreset method.

Here's a snippet from one of the examples:

const _dotgraph = `digraph
{
    lfo1 -> osc2 [label="to Transpose", remap_scale=10]; 
    osc2 -> osc1 -> mix1 -> out;
    adsr1 -> mix1 [label="to 1"];
}`;
let randomChoice = 5; // lfo.Style is an enum
let syntho = scene.NewAnode("Hz.Syntho", {
    name:"Syntho", 
    preset: 
    {
       _dotgraph: _dotgraph.replace(/\n/g, "\\n"), // escape newlines
        "mix1": {
            Gain: -6 // dB
        },
        "adsr": {
            A: .2,
            R: .2,
            S: .5,
            T: 0,
        },
        "osc1": {
            Amplitude: .4,
            Waveform: 0, // 0: sine, 1 is square,
            UnisonVoices: 3,
            UnisonDetune: 5, // semitones
            UnisonSpread: .5,
            PMScale: 8,
            UnisonVoices: 3,
        },
        "osc2" : {
            Amplitude: 6, // PM amount
        },
        "lfo1": {
            // choices are [0-1] for plotting, mod-remapping applied in graph
            // choices are wired to transpose which is measured in semitones.
            _choices: [0, .3, .7, .9], 
            Style: randomChoice,
            Period: .1, // seconds (2hz)
            Loop: 1
        },
        "reverb": {
            Model: 1 ,
            Wet: .9 ,
            SSRoomSize: 30,
        }
    }});

See Also

Hz.Syntho Examples, Hz.Samplo