Based on a recent video Benn Jordan made:
It’s a synthesizer which uses optically scanned tonewheels driven by drone motors. Why? I don’t know, but it sounds cool. But it costs $3200 and that’s too much money to achieve that sound. So I made a Vital bank/preset that does it
MotorSynth.vitalbank (652.6 KB)
This is submitted as a bank rather than as a single preset because I created 4 wavetables, one for each of the oscillator options in the MotorSynth; “sine”, “saw”, “square” (these are in scare quotes because no, no they are not those waveforms, it’s just what the optical disc pattern is approximating), and the magnetic pickup detecting the motor spin. The preset comes with sine active, and saw and square inactive; the pickup couldn’t be added reasonably (I tried combining them to one multi-shape wavetable but it loses some of that characteristic quaver trying to fit each one into only 25% of the available frame space) but the way the real MotorSynth works, you have two oscillators which each support a varying shape for each, so I figured selectable wavetables was the “truer” approach.
I also included the tuned noise of the motors spinning as a noise sample. Macros control motor noise level, oscillator instability (from rock-solid waveform to increasingly wavery pitch drift and rumble due to the motor inaccuracy), and pitch drift (how long it takes the motors to spin to the new desired Hz). You could also employ randomization on them but I found that the wavetable jitter already captures it fairly well and I didn’t want to add more.