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Who here has gone down the coding there own plugin route (oscillators, filters etc?) & (referring to C, C++ low level programming etc compared to MAX MSP - Reaktor)

I've been reading up on it atm and got to admit am struggling a bit! but wanted to know how long it took for you to get a grasp of it?

I have and I'm still balls deep. Filter design is a mother fucker. I've had to take some math detours along the way.
I just finished this free book. It's fairly good compared to others I looked at and not too long. There's a few chapters you can skip that don't pertain to audio.

I'm just about to start this one. It has a nice math appendix which I started with. Haven't really read much of it yet though but it looks fairly good. Hopefully it'll hammer some of the stuff I've already somewhat learned into my head a bit better. Probably good to read a few different people's explanations to cover parts that are foggy.

I've also got the DAFX book but I'm not really a big fan so far. It's written by many authors and it seems from what I've read so far that their literary skills don't match their DSP skills. The first chapter droned on and on and on about classifying effects in the most boring way and then abruptly switched to z transforms. It's supposed to be for people with very minimal math skills as well I'll probably come back to it after I've got all the z plane stuff down really well. It is quite the comprehensive book. I just don't think they do the best job at explaining the information.

Thanks for the link man, will check it out

i use synthmaker a tonne but cant code at all, if u find coding too hard or want to try something else synthmaker is very fun.
the truth is not everything created in synthmaker turns out to be cpu intensive, most people don't optimise enough in synthmaker/synthedit which is why these programs get such a bad name.

Will Pirkle - Designing Audio Effect Plug-ins in C++: With Digital Audio Signal Processing Theory

It arrived yesterday and I think it would be good for your purposes. His RackAFX framework makes it easier to get set up and not worry about the GUI part.

I also suggest the DSP and Audio Programming section of KVR Forum.

This tutorial just went up.

Martin Finke - Making Audio Plugins

jonahmann wrote:This tutorial just went up.

Martin Finke - Making Audio Plugins

Cheers man!

Wow that's exactly what I need right now, even down to using WDL-OL. It's been a bit rough trying to get things set up, hopefully this will get me on course.

Designing filters is challenging to say the least, ADSP is kind of a black art in the programming world.

Start with something simple like mapping the frequency response curve of a butterworth lowpass (wikipedia is super helpful for this), or making a simple oscillator.

Then keep challenging yourself to code harder and harder concepts like the FFT, the wavelets transform, resampling via various interpolation methods, pitch shifting...

Here is a really great link for source code: http://musicdsp.org/

Basically it is a lot of learning but eventually you will be able to program your own effects/synths.

Making them in to VST plugins is a whole other story...
as is reading/writing audio files.

GregoryTJ wrote:Making them in to VST plugins is a whole other story...

Does SynthEdit still have a module SDK? If so, that would seem like an useful place to start - you can pretty much write blobs of pure DSP code and then use SynthEdit to wire them together and stick a user interface on, which seems like a pretty hefty win if the DSP is what you're actually interested in.

For my part, learning to code DSP is on the list, but not high on it. TBH there are a lot of very clever people doing a lot of very hard stuff to make eg better sounding filters, so I don't harbour any illusions that I'm going to rock up, fire up the VST SDK and suddenly produce something that sounds amazing. It's the next level of abstraction up - how you connect and control the basic building blocks - that seems more inspiring to me.

slothrop wrote:

GregoryTJ wrote:Making them in to VST plugins is a whole other story...

Does SynthEdit still have a module SDK? If so, that would seem like an useful place to start - you can pretty much write blobs of pure DSP code and then use SynthEdit to wire them together and stick a user interface on, which seems like a pretty hefty win if the DSP is what you're actually interested in.

For my part, learning to code DSP is on the list, but not high on it. TBH there are a lot of very clever people doing a lot of very hard stuff to make eg better sounding filters, so I don't harbour any illusions that I'm going to rock up, fire up the VST SDK and suddenly produce something that sounds amazing. It's the next level of abstraction up - how you connect and control the basic building blocks - that seems more inspiring to me.

Indeed it does, I own Synthedit but never actually used it much.

Flowstone is cool because you can program modules using ruby which is just a great language to work with.

I was actually wondering this myself. I have been interested in dsp, just synth programming in general, for a while, the closest i ever came was a week spent trying to figure out ableton's python implementation. I am really interested in some of these resources. I know https://www.coursera.org has some programming courses, they usually have some high quality free courses.

It got this..
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Audio-Programmi ... 0262014467

It has, from looking at it, everything you would need. Bit of a crazy book though TBH. The thing tries to teach you the whole C language in a few pages. I'm pretty sure I have seen like 400 page books on C basics before.

I have been struggling to understand parts and I thought I was smart. I do think it is meant to go along with a MIT degree program though.

I stopped reading that because it's so discursive, but it did teach me some new things about C++. Might go back and read it later once I've read a few other books.

I don't know jack about dsp. I'm very thankful for these resources.

The best productions are made by producers who know how sound works, top to bottom. It's all connected.