Really this is just an implementation of a basic oscillator, filter and envelope. No harm in that all and it's more than I could manage - it's fun and nice, but it's nothing like a 303. "Building an acid synth" would be fairer.

The accent and glide are core components of the sound, as is the really quite unique sequencer control - from the strange bendy growls to the classic acid bark the accent brings out. Would have been nice to see a deeper dive into why that is and why it's different from implementing a normal portamento-style glide as many other synths do, like the SH-101 - which cannot sound that close to a 303 due to that glide. Well it's also got a different oscillator and filter, with no accent either, but I don't want that to ruin the story ;-)

sonic potions has an analysis of the cpu timings here https://sonic-potions.com/Documentation/Analysis_of_the_D650...

Theres also some nice articles about the diode ladder filter in the 303, similar to the one in the vcs3 https://www.timstinchcombe.co.uk/index.php?pge=diode2

I'm kinda tempted to give it to my neighbor's son though. He knows about all this stuff and loves it. He'd appreciate it more. He’d also love my Roland D-50. He also comes by the garage to help out with stuff. Like the son I never had.

My daughter, though, does not appreciate this tech stuff whatsoever. Calls my gear room the ‘junk room’ .

Back in my day of the demoscene and Buzz...

demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2kl-CW9snU

I'm just joshing - it's very cool!

No words can describe the feeling of original Yamaha cs-80.

It is very unfortunate as there is no true alternative to a 80kg, age issues ridden, ultra expensive antique device.

Back in the day, I was quite heavy into the x0xb0x. (https://www.ladyada.net/make/x0xb0x/) It's an open hardware 303 clone by Ladyada and was designed to use as many of the original 303 components as possible. According to those who own both, the sounds are essentially identical. (But the x0x is much easier to use.)

Somewhere in 2006, I was too late the to party to snag one of the original kits, but a little cottage industry formed on the x0xb0x forums to support the community of people who wanted to build and mod their own. Adafruit provided the PCBs, the common components came from DigiKey and Mouser, the rarer components from eBay or other forum members.

I ended up buying enough components to build six, but only ended up building three. The first one I kept, the other two I sold. I recouped my cost with those so I also ended up selling the rest of the components later as my interest in building them waned. I should have held onto those and built the rest with my kids when they got older, since even the replacement components are hard to come by these days and they are still a fun project to build.

That aside, I've been wanting to play with this kind of music making via code, this is a useful write-up.

However!

As soon as you cabled all together their imperfections added up and they started to groove like nothing that has been heard before.

But as a non-music person and developer I'd rather use an interface like Ableton where you see separate tracks/times line up kind of thing... but aside from that I ended up just getting a music subscription service that you can use in your YT videos which is what I was after.

Everything is a time sink it seems, gotta choose where you put your time into if 40 hrs of your life is taken up by day job already.

I've owned a bunch of different synthesizers and used a bunch of DAWs over the years and it was clear to me where I needed to make my edits to affect the signal chain.

We do real-time client-side audio processing in Emurse, and there were definitely a bunch of challenges to overcome there, so it would be interesting to hear more about what went into building the tool.

Without having the source to the WASM diodeLadder(), the following is just a guess: they implemented it exactly like every other "Diode Ladder" on GitHub, rather than a true SPICE simulation. Some evidence for that: the CPU usage would explode.

Ummmm, what? If you've heard the word "acid" in a song, it was definitely not a reference to the 303 and definitely the other use of "acid" like its use on the dancefloor. If you've heard someone describe a song as "acid", maybe it could be a reference to the 303.

edit: This is, without a doubt, the best soft-synth emulation I know of these days and it's a hell of a lot of fun: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/pure-acid/id1481283602

[1]https://www.youtube.com/@MoritzKlein0/