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Clap Saw Demo Synth

The Clap Saw Demo Synth is a synth we put together in the week before the CLAP 1.0 Launch to show the developer community a few things we wanted to cover in our example base. It serves as an example in the following ways

  • It binds a VSTGUI UI to a CLAP plugin without using any frameworks
  • It shows polyphonic parameter modulation and note expression support
  • It sounds pretty good, with a Saw from the algorithm in Surge's Modern oscillator and an SVF filter from cytomic
  • It is released under the MIT license

While some folks might actually want to use this as a synth, it really does serve as a pedagogical exercise more than anything else.

Building the synth

git clone https://github.com/surge-synthesizer/clap-saw-demo
cd clap-saw-demo
git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir ignore
cmake -Bignore/build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release   # or DEBUG or whatever
cmake --build ignore/build

and you will get ignore/build/clap-saw-demo.clap

Understanding the code

We tried to make an effort to have the code clean to read with reasonable comments. The best starting point is probably clap-saw-demo.h if you want to understand the modulation system or clap-saw-demo-editor.h if you want to understand the VSTGUI bindings.

There are still a few small things which aren't done. The issues list in this github repo is the book of work to get to a final state.

Sending a change, fix, or PR

This is an open contribution project! We welcome changes and contributions. If you find a small bug or modify the cmake file to work on a new OS or fix a comment please just send in a PR.

If you want to do something more, we also welcome that! Probably best to open a github issue to chat first and also, wouldn't you rather work on surge or shortcircuit? Also please keep a few things in mind

  1. This is designed to be a CLAP example, so porting it to AudioUnit or whatever would not be productive. If you love the algo and sound, just lift the voice class into a new synth
  2. This is designed to be a CLAP example, so adding a hundred new features which would make it an awesome synth seems like it would be confusing. Also, if you want hundreds of features, you can download Surge for free from this very github project!
  3. The UI is not very pleasant. I wrote minimal VSTGUI as an example but it could look better. If you want to do this and code it up, go for it!

A note to Linux users

CLAP works great on linux! We have done loads of our primary CLAP development there. But VSTGUI on linux is a bit trickier.

Anyway I think I finally got it working, but I need to write documentation and check it again. As of this commit, on Linux it works in BWS43b6 with multiple plugisn in process starting and stopping UIs and it doesn't leak timers or FDs. But some work to do on documenting and reviewing it.