David Azar
R-Synth
A web synthesizer designed for beginners
Tags: Music, Web
About the project
Synthesizers and incredible devices that can be challenging to understand. R-synth is an online synth that helps beginners create new patches with the click of a button.
Synthesizers are those weird electronic keyboards with a lot of knobs – they have existed since the 1960s. They are used to create sound by modifying the underlying electric signal behind it, and those tenths of knobs and buttons are there to give musicians control over many different parameters, each having a direct impact on one of the multiple qualities of sound.
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Even as a trained musician myself, when I first started using synthesizers felt extremely overwhelmed and intimidated, and this is a very common thing for people trying synthesizers for the first time. There are a lot of things you need to understand and take into account, and it can be very hard to hear the impact that of every value on sound itself. Additionally, this kind of hardware can be very expensive too. This is why I decided to create the R-Synth.
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R-Synth is an online synthesizer built with Tone.js that lets anybody create a synthesizer with the click of a button. There are 15 different parameters that get randomized every time the 'Randomize' button is clicked. Users can toggle parameters to randomize them or not, progressively sculpting the synthesizer and finding the sound they love – the combinations are endless.
R-Synth works with any MIDI keyboard, computer keyboard or by clicking on the keys with the computer mouse.​​
Tools
Tone.js
jQuery
HTML/CSS
Final words
R-Synth is an educational tool that has helped me and other musicians understand sound synthesis better. It has helped me explore sounds that I wouldn't have been able to produce by myself. Others have it useful too, and it is hosted as a showcase example in the tone.js oficial website and has more than 100 unique users per month.