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I wanted to see if it was possible to make a somewhat-usable synthesizer using nothing but GML - no sound assets at all. With the recent addition of audio effects in GameMaker, I figured I'd challenge myself to make something close to a real synthesizer you might find in your DAW of choice. I was able to incorporate custom waveform drawing (limited to 10 "chunks" of the actual data, only because that sounded fun to me), basic attack and decay envelope controls, various effects, and the ability to play audio with your keyboard including octave control.

I don't think that something like this has any useful real-world uses, but it was a fun thing to create. So now that it's complete, I want to share my project with the world as a demo to download and play with. You can also download the complete project source code if you'd like to learn from it. No fancy license, just don't repackage it and sell it or claim you made it or anything like that.

You might ask, "Well if you can do this, can you make a full blown DAW in GameMaker?" The answer is probably yes, but not without some serious heavy lifting from DLLs. My synth is fairly limited as it is, so creating a DAW with tons of extra features and instruments would be a serious undertaking. There's also no way to visualize audio levels in GameMaker (at time of writing, any way) which is a pretty important feature to have when creating music.

Hopefully my little project is at least entertaining to some. Enjoy!

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

tophers-gm-synth-demo.zip 4 MB
Version 1.0.0
TophersGMSynth.yyz 286 kB
Version 1.0.0

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