Why does my synth distort?

kflak's icon

I'm making my first synth, and want to be able to sweep up and down the frequency ranges using a midi controller. However, when I use the button to sweep up and down, I'm getting some very heavy, digital distortion, which is not really the sound I'm looking for. Tried using a line~ object between the controller and the oscillator, but to no avail. Am I missing something really basic that I should have seen in one of the tutorials? Including the patch below.

2756.pitchysines.maxpat
Max Patch
Chris Muir's icon

I think that the MIDI controller might be a red herring. If I just let your patch idle for a while it gets really nasty. I can't tell you why, but I can tell you what. In your "his" sub patch, the right two cycle~ objects are going crazy ofter a while.

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

It doesn't seem to happen if I keep the freq control in the signal domain. Save this abstraction as "ScaleSigUni" :

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

And here's your "his" sub patch edited to use it:

kflak's icon

Thanks a lot! WIll experiment with it and see if I can make it work as desired :-) It seems like there is a conflict between the lfo output and the midi controller output that contributes to the distortion as well...