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What is Tunefish

Tunefish is a very tiny virtual analog synthesizer. It is developed to fit into about 10kb of compressed machine code while still producing an audio quality that can compete with commercial synthesizers. This site was created to make the VST/AU version of it available to the public. This plugin, unlike the version of TF which is used in 64k intros of our group Brain Control is of course larger, mainly because it has a UI and uses the excellent Juce framework for C++. (This is true for TF4 and TF3. TF2 uses the VSTGUI library.) The synth is free but comes without any warranties. It is tested on Renoise but if you want to use it with different DAWs, please do so and let us know about your experience. Tunefish is an ongoing project under active development so if you have any comments or wishes, please let us know. Also, if you make some music with it or create soundbanks you're more than welcome to share them with us or on the Tunefish page at KVR Audio.

Tunefish v4

Tunefish v4 was developed as a smaller replacement of Tunefish v3 with roughly the same power. It was developed for our intro Turtles all the way down which forced us to rethink how to most effectively produce music in very tight machine code. Read more about it here. The result was totally worth it and some might argue it is even more powerful. To open it up to a broader range of people, it was also ported over to Linux and MacOS and it was given a new polished UI.

Features

Available on Windows and Linux as VST (32 and 64 bit) and on Mac as Audio Unit or VST

Improved UI compared to TF3 which will visualize all modulations

Uses an additive synthesis based wavetable generator

The Noise generator can produce any frequency of noise with any bandwidth

Lowpass, Highpass, Bandpass and an improved Notch filter are available

2 ADSRs and 2 LFOs that can be linked to pretty much any important knob using a modulation matrix

Supported effects are Flanger, Chorus, Distortion, Delay, Reverb, EQ and Formant

The effects stack allows for any permutation of up to 10 effects

Tunefish v3

Tunefish v3 was done because quite frankly, Tunefish v2 was a mess code-wise and I learned a lot during the development of it. I wanted to try out a new idea of mine which was using splines for implementing an oscillator. One piece of code which can still produce the same sounds as a range of oscillators in v2. It was first used in our intro Pandora. Additionally to that I wanted to get away from the VSTGui library which I did not really like at that time and instead used the Qt framework and later on migrated to Juce.

Features

It's implemented as a VST instrument

It uses a spline based oscillator that can by configured very dynamically.

Additionally to normal sine, sawtooth, triangle and pulse waveforms, it can do anything that is possible with 6 points and step/linear/spline interpolation.

The Noise generator can produce any frequency of noise with any bandwidth

Lowpass, Highpass, Bandpass and Notch filters are available

2 ADSRs and 2 LFOs that can be linked to pretty much any important knob using a modulation matrix

Supported effects are Flanger, Chorus, Distortion, Delay, Reverb, EQ and Formant

The effects stack allows for any permutation of up to 10 effects

Tunefish v2

Tunefish v2 is the first synth that I developed that you could call a synth that "makes sense". v1 was messy and I was learning synthesis concepts at that time. Additionally to that v2 is the first one that is implemented as a VST plugin using the VSTGui library. This is the reason why v1 never made it on this page. It had to be used "manually" and what this means is basically you had to hardcode your patches in the sourcecode. Yes, you read that right. Yes, I was stupid back then. The final Tunefish v2 was first used in our intro A daily dose of random. Horrible visuals but quite a nice sound. To get an idea of what v1 sounded like check out the first and only intro that was made with v1, The Icemachine.

Features