Bentō could be such a brilliant machine for soundscape design inspiration. Sadly, it is a standalone application.<p>In some ways it’s more versatile and suitable for workflows that don’t involve a DAW. However, having it available as a VST/AU would’ve opened up countless new possibilities—for example, after seeing the demo video I immediately had a vision of a soundscape that uses a few of those simultaneously, but 1) the app does not let you launch multiple instances of itself; 2) even if that was allowed, orchestrating launching all of them and saving/loading corresponding presets every time would be an obstacle; 3) that aside, playing (let alone automating) all instances when performing or recording your scape would be quite a royal challenge.<p>And as a minor grumble, unlike VST plugins and audio units commonly distributed as single files that can be manually copied where appropriate, this application needs to be installed (and with root privileges to boot, not sure why that’s necessary).
The video is well worth watching to understand what the main sections do. If you have some familiarity with analog synthesis, the components will be familiar (oscillators, filters, modulation, clock/envelope generators), but the magic is in how they're wired together and the design choices of what the potentiometers affect.<p>This really is an incredible piece of virtual electronic design. It's surprisingly deep, yet effortlessly responsive and playable.
I love circuits (I'm poring over the circuit diagrams for a Rodgers 32c/d organ from the 60's in my spare time).<p>I'm a musician (degree in piano performance... currently trying to fix an organ so I can start organ lessons).<p>I am not a guitarist, but I can appreciate the utility and function of guitar pedals.<p>I don't understand the use for this. I don't see how it is used for music, and the sounds do not seem pleasant to me. Can someone help me understand what I'm missing?
Fantastic sounds.<p>I built a feedback-heavy synth based on Reaktor Spark. I was disappointed to discover how difficult it is to anticipate the pitch of the signal, which limits its harmonic usefulness. For a sufficiently narrow band around each preset, including the frequency of the source waveforms, the map from those source waveforms' frequency to the output frequency can in general be discovered. But as you wander around the relationship can change wildly -- indeed, some output signals don't even have anything that sounds like a fundamental frequency.<p>I wanted to program something that would manipulate the source waveforms' frequencies to automatically produce an output signal of the pitch a keyboardist had asked for. I think I could with sufficient time but it's a nontrivial problem.
The description reminds me of the Lyra-8 by Soma Laboratory. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8od1a1mySU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8od1a1mySU</a>
This reminds me of <i>Wow Control</i> [1] which is a tape simulator but can also produce unstable analog-like noise.<p>[1] <a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zgSGuJB5gKk" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zgSGuJB5gKk</a>