Introducing "NOISE": My first custom oscillator for the KORG Nu:Tekt NTS-1 Digital Synth Kit, Jabun's Generation Supernova full album is streaming online, Tr-505 fully fixed & serviced, over 40 MILLION collaborative YouTube views + more updates!

Hi everyone and hope you're having a great week so far! It's been a busy but painful week here at JabunAudio, as I seem to have injured my back (slowly but surely getting better), so I've spent the time mostly doing admin and promo work, as well as writing up all the Patreon reward posts for the next 2 months (finished), all while trying not to move around too much... No bass recording for me this week (at the time of writing at least), but before the pain kicked in, I had a very productive Saturday finally repairing my Roland Tr-505 drum machine!

​Last week's 505 Day jam was a fun one, though I noticed that the volume control on my own machine was playing up worse than ever... The 505 had been an amazing 29th birthday present from my twin Eamon, a 1980s vintage unit with Eamon's own handmade battery cover to replace the missing one it didn't come with. Even when I was first given it though, it was difficult to dial in the volume low, as the control was crackly and the right channel tended to get super loud at low volumes for some reason. I thought it was a faulty potentiometer, but man oh man the 505 has a very specialised part for that (next to impossible to find) and while I had been keeping my eye out for one for the past few years, I've still yet to see or find any. After the amazing success simply cleaning the (what I thought were unserviceable) pots on my homemade double-neck guitar in March though, I figured I'd give it a shot for the 505, and sure enough, with a good spray of contact cleaner and some touched up solder joints, it worked wonders! The volume control (my only sonic gripe with it) is all smooth and working perfectly now, which also means I can play it in headphones again without fear of blowing my ears out! While I had the drum machine apart too, I also took the liberty of removing a tiny bit of fluff trapped between the clear protective plastic cover and the LCD display too. That'd been bugging me for YEARS! Happy times for the Tr-505 and wishing it many more decades of good health to come!

Another small update before we get onto the main news for this week: on the front page (and a few other pages) of this site there's a statistic which makes me truly proud: the fact that the work I've done as JabunAudio has contributed to over 200 music tracks and over 20 MILLION views of YouTube animations! That's still mind-blowing to me. While I'd only recently updated that number to over 200 music tracks though, I remembered that I hadn't actually checked the number of YouTube views in a long while, and after a short investigation, it turns out that it's now WELL OVER 40 MILLION! Just astonishing, and thanks so much to everyone who's been watching and still watching all the hard work myself and my various collaborators have worked on. It really means a lot to me that people are still enjoying all these animations, and I hope there'll be more to share with you in the not too distant future!

Onto the main news for this week, I have 2 things to share with you: first of all something I made I'm super pleased with and is free to download (I'm sure you can tell by the post title), and next, the final new music upload for Jabun's Generation Supernova album! Let's start with that mystery make!

As you may know, I recently was gifted a KORG Nu:Tekt NTS-1 build it yourself digital synth kit for my birthday last month (huge thanks again to my twin Eamon), an exciting compact digital synthesizer which you put together yourself (IKEA style), that KORG also released a free software development kit (the logue-sdk) so you can create your own custom sound sources (oscillators) and audio effects for it (IF you know how to program in C++ (which I admittedly do not, but that's no problem))! You can use it standalone, or as an audio processor or sound module and it's incredibly versatile! There was one thing which seemed missing out of the box though...

Among all the custom user oscillators people had made and distributed on the internet (and there are a tonne of great ones), for the life of me I could not find anything which was just a simple noise generator (free or otherwise) so after some research, I figured I'd do some code tinkering try to make my own... and it was a success! No point in keeping it to myself soooooo..

Introducing NOISE: a simple white noise oscillator with adjustable soft-clipping for the KORG Nu:Tekt NTS-1 so you can shape the noise with the envelopes, filters and effects for making percussion sounds, sweeps and the such!

NOISE is free to download with an optional donation here on the JabunAudio website, and you can find out more about it along with a quick demo video explaining the features and giving some usage examples below:

https://www.jabunaudio.com/news/introducing-noise-a-custom-white-noise-user-oscillator-for-the-korg-nutekt-nts-1-digital-synth-kit-free-download-or-donation

I'm still new to the coding for this synth so it's a VERY basic user oscillator, but as I learn more, I look forward to creating some more exciting custom content in the future! If anyone else has one of these fine DIY synths, then I hope you like my very first program for it and enjoy making some noise, with NOISE! Check out the intro video below:

Since its release my notifications have been filled with some lovely comments, and I'm so pleased that everyone is enjoying it so far! Fingers crossed that KORG adds it to their official user oscillator database! That would be the final seal of approval!

Lastly this week, the final (for now) weekly new music upload is here and Jabun's full Generation Supernova album is now available for streaming on YouTube and Newgrounds! Check out the full Generation Supernova album below:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAGi_mCVc30
Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/1031625

Or check out the playlisted songs on the platform or your choice:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6tKVPNjy1_BP9Em-lnNl3w9M8_pOjMxZ

Newgrounds: https://www.newgrounds.com/playlists/view/a78406727321023caf886e4645d4c5b2

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/1I3XVBjn5hqjUdrg1HWaMT

And if you like what you hear, pick up the Generation Supernova album on Bandcamp:
https://jabun.bandcamp.com/album/generation-supernova

Or grab it with the entire Jabun and Better Than The Book discographies when you become a supporter on Patreon for as little as $1 a month (The reward archives have just been updated too)! Hope to see you there!

Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/NickStanding
Explore the rewards archives: https://www.patreon.com/posts/50344842

That wraps up the promo posts and uploads for Jabun's Generation Supernova album! I hope you've enjoyed these generative soundscapes and experiments over the last few months and I'm sure I'll be back in the not too distant future with another grand Jabun adventure to share with you (still sitting on over 70 minutes of demos from last year's writing sessions)! 

And that's it for this post! I'll be aiming to get back to bass recording very shortly, though apart from that, I'm not too sure what this coming week will have in store! The next set of $5+ Patreon rewards will be out at the end of month again as usual (with the $1+ rewards following a week later on the first Wednesday of June), so at the very latest, the next blog post will be in 2 weeks time, unless there's anything particularly interesting to report next week. Until then, I hope you have a great May ahead filled with good times and vibes and thanks as always for supporting JabunAudio, Jabun, Better Than The Book and my various projects in all the ways you can! All the best, enjoy the music and take care!