Tagline: Absolutely the worst and best interface I have ever seen.

It's all flac's fault.

I've been geeking out on the practicalities of synthesizers for the past month, or so. But flac's basic class on synths pushed me over the edge. Now, I gotta say, I'm pretty possessed by this new-to-me tech, and way of thinking about sound creation.

There are a dozen new apps on my iPhone and iPad, and the weirdest one - by far - is called Fundamental, from guys who call themselves sonicLAB:

That row of 8 dials allows you to select individual tones or frequencies. You can use any number of them to build your base tone.

Then you can put that tone through normal synthesizer modulations, filters, and transformations: Gain Modulation, Frequency Modulation, and Pulse Modulation. As well as fine-tuning each of the 8 frequencies with gain, boost, finetune, and pan.

Which, when you look at the bottom center of the screen, lets you tune and shape how each of these filters (G, B, F, P) operate, by waveform, rate, scale, etc.

THEN... there's the weird little blue boxes in the top right, below the 8th frequency dial... which are mathematical operations that can be used to wire any factors together, and make them play off each other. So when oscillator 6 goes up, the wave form on oscillator 5 changes to a square wave instead... or induces a random variable to the fundamental oscillator (#1 dial on the left).

THIS SHIT IS NUTS.

I spent about two hours the other day with a single note droning... I adjusted little settings here and there to induce some modulation... to push two notes slightly out of tune with each other to make a chorus-like effect... and tweaked it a little here and there...

If anybody else had heard this, I'm sure it would have been annoying as shit.

For me? I used it to write a song, a la Sonic Fields.

Geeks, synth heads, fellow Hubskis! Download this app and weird out on it for a while... you will come away from the experience... puzzled... and happy... and feeling weird.