Quite unusual for me to use a soft synth. I ran across Ongaku on YouTube. Ongaku is available on Giorgio Sancristoforo’s website. Scroll down until you see it.

Why I Like Ongaku

It is simple, yet complex. Simple in terms of using it. Complex as to the sounds it can produce. It differs from most software synthesizers (even others from Georgio Sancristoforo) in that it is completely pre-patched. The audio and control paths are fixed and displayed graphically on the screen. That is a useful restriction! There is no patching. But there is endless tweaking. Lots of switches and pots. There are four identical sound generators that mix by level and panning that you control. It has a modest LP filter and a reverb. The generators are by design stochastic. For example the A/R envelope generators have attack and release parameters, but they set maximum times, not fixed times. Then there is a global randomizing section. Each of the generators can select the impact of this section for themselves. Finally, Ongaku comes with a nice selection of presets that can serve as jumping off points for your own tweaks.

If it’s not patchable, why do I call this my first patch with Ongaku?

That is because I can route the output of Ongaku into my Eurorack modular and try adding additional effects. For this patch I sent Ongaku through Make Noise Mimeophon and Qu-Bit Aurora. I will be trying many others.

In the photo above I take the outputs from ADDAC711 into my effects chain through the Tesseract DABS DPDT manual switch. The output of the effects goes to the other side of the switch, and the common goes to my final output. That way I have a full bypass for Dry/Wet comparison.

Here are two recordings, the first is dry (the direct output of Ongaku) and the second going through the modular effects.