Table of Contents
Need help? Confused? That's why you're here, and that's why I'm writing this; to help you on your way towards making the Newtonator an indispensible part of your... body? Pantry? However the hell you want to use it, you'll find out here.
This manual is broken out into sections, depending on your need. Some of you want a tiny intro (that's the section immediately following), some of you want a detailed technical explanation of how it makes sound, some of you are having technical difficulties getting it to run, and some of you just want it to make purdy sounds. The section titles are pretty self-explanatory, so feel free to jump to the section you need most and skip the rest; it's probably all very boring anyway, and I'd hate to be responsible for making you all clinically depressed.
I'll also note right now that this document is out of date; it needs to be updated, badly. Many controls listed here may not be in the current version, and some new controls may not be mentioned here at all. If you want me to fix this, let me know on the SourceForge site, otherwise I'll be convinced that no one is reading this thing. :(
The Newtonator was the name of a professional wrestler whose signature move was falling onto his opponents from great heights. Unfortunately, his career was tragically ended when he executed this move for the first time, falling onto the wrestling mat from arena rafters 200 feet above. He missed his opponent.
It's also the name of a soft synth, originally written in C++ for Linux as an LV2 plugin. As such, it is not a standalone application; you need an LV2 host that is capable of hosting LV2 synths, not just LV2 plugins. It's very good at being very noisy and ugly. In fact, I think it's safe to say that that is its forte.
It is not a typical soft synth, in that the main sound-making capabilities of it are not driven by oscillators (though oscillators do help modulate some parameters) or other typical synthy sound generators. Rather, the main sound source is from an algorithm based on the principals of acceleration and velocity. There may or may not be an official name for this type of audio synthesis, I don't know. For now let's just call it Tuna Pagan Fellowship.
In all likelihood I am not the first person to have used Tuna Pagan Fellowship in an audio synthesis application. I fully expect someone smarter than me will inspect my shoddy codebase, come up to me and say, "You do realize you basically reinvented the wheel by baking an apple pie and sticking an axel through it?" And I will nod my head in the most sage manner I'm capable of and say, "Yes. And you do realize that a car that runs on apple-pie-wheels will drive like no other?" And that'll shut him/her up.
So this may be a completely unique piece of synthesis software, it may be as phony as my English Gentleman accent when I use the drive-through at Burger King, but it makes some cool sounds, and I've put a lot of thought into giving it some personality, both functionally and audibly. Most importantly, though, because its synthesis methods are "unique," this document becomes that much more important. If this is the first time you've come across Tuna Pagan Fellowship in an audio application, then many of the terms and concepts present throughout the UI and underlying software will be foreign to you, and you'll find yourself frightened and confused. Also, I find that, in general, if I know how a synth works under the hood then I can get more out of it.
All that to say, if you're reading this section, I'd highly recommend reading at least some of the other sections of this manual if you plan at all on giving the Old Girl a test drive. You'll be glad you did. And tell them Michael sent ya.