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Just heard the news. RIP. What a loss, and holy poo poo what a legacy
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Jun 2, 2022 17:52
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This soft spoken chill dude on YouTube shared a really interesting patch technique to use the lfo on a bastl kastle as a sound source. It inspired me to try it out, and I figured out a way to send in cv from my microfreak at the same time, so I can play it with the touchplate! https://youtu.be/JyrNW6nNJwc
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Jun 2, 2022 18:10
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx2q5GjOlvs
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Jun 2, 2022 19:20
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I've been watching some videos about simple building blocks for 'neuro' basses, and as always, trying to adapt the techniques to the hardware that I have and compare how the results sound vs. the VSTs used in the tutorials. Particularly, Underbelly's video on the subject has some interesting ideas re: square waves. He begins with an instance of Operator, demonstrating in a spectrograph the harmonic series of a simple square wave. Then he nixes that in favour of using a handful of sine oscillators (arranged so no FM is actually occurring) to reconstruct some of the key harmonics in a square - notably, avoiding the first harmonic altogether and using two more sines for the second and third order harmonics (I may be using these terms incorrectly). When filtered and saturated (and filtered and saturated again), this becomes a fairly bog-standard neurobass. Some OTT, more filter layering and some subtle time-based effects would no doubt fill it out into something unique. I'm wondering firstly, why this is done. My best stab at it is that an actual mathematical square wave already has loads of harmonic content in it that can get muddy quickly when adding saturation - in my past attempts at writing this kind of stuff, this was a problem I could only resolve with judicious use of filters, and would mount frustration quickly. I'm guessing that using additive sines instead of a big thick square gives you more control over this harmonic content, specifically like I said removing that first-order harmonic from the picture entirely. All of this makes more space for saturation and compression to colour the sound further without turning it to muck. Is this accurate? Secondly, here's where I'm about to betray a huge lack of understanding of the mathematics of things. Like I said I'm always watching tutorials with the aim to adapt their techniques to the hardware I already have. Both of my multi-osc hardware synths (Virus TI and Ultranova) are not built the same way as Operator, which I understand to be a facsimile of a DX7 not unlike FM8 - is this correct? I'm talking about the way oscillators are tuned; Operator/FM8/DX7 deal in ratios as opposed to the simple semitone-tuning knob present in most synths that are chiefly additive/subtractive. So using something like the Virus, I'd set all three oscillators to sine, and in order to duplicate what Operator is doing in the given example, I'm getting close with oscs 2/3 set to +28 and +34 semitones, respectively... but it's still not right. Is this a fundamental limitation of using oscillators tuned by semitone and not ratio? Lastly, less of a query and more of a "well this sucks," OTT doesn't really work on any of my hardware without bringing out some really nasty digital noise at the tail of every note. This happens even if I've got the Virus TI coming in through its USB input. I'm wondering if this is something that I can ignore and slap on the OTT in post once I've burned everything to audio and filtered/EQ'd stuff properly, or if my system is actually much noisier than I think. These are the kind of hassles that make me wish I had just gone all ITB like everyone else when I started 'songwriting'.
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Jun 3, 2022 01:28
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Semitones are built around the tempered scale, and only octaves will align with the harmonic series. For example, the third harmonic is actually sharper than 19 semitones, about two cents sharper iirc. Give your oscillators a nudge and see if that helps. I don't really know anything about neuro, but I would guess that going the additive route helps to avoid some more extreme aliasing on digital gear. Higher harmonics will get you in trouble if their frequency is equal to half the sampling rate or higher. So Math fucked around with this message at 02:16 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 02:09
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Neuro basses started as Reese basses and that was 2 detuned saw waves w/ a tight filter. This has the downside of occasionally phasing out your fundamental for longer than is really okay for bass for a dance track (remember, these are patches w/ jobs, they can be as cool as they want but if they don't... land, the song doesn't work) PWM was next because you can do more to control the phasing w/ the modulator while still getting a harmonically equivalent signal. FM was after that, w/ the rationale that you can do more to tweak the phase-relationships of the 5-6 harmonics from the original oscillator that you're letting through by manipulating oscillators that are set up to be dealt w/ in phase terms than the standard constant-running or mayyyybe soft/hard sync analog options. Also you can do e.g. a saw wave getting filter swept pretty trivially w/ 2 ops, so it cuts out the filter as a req, and then lets you go from there. The very basic square-harmonic thing you described sounds to me like a fixed-phase approximation of a low, resonant filter around the 3rd or 4th harmonic of a square wave pair cancelling each other's second harmonic, done w/ the minimum processing power and track instances. Or saws/more cancellation, maybe. This has the disadvantage of sounding kinda sterile (I imagine aliasing is a concern, as is cpu), but the advantage of being really easy to modulate. Because everyone is doing this stuff in the box. To me all the above is totally academic because the heavy lifting of the patch is still gonna be in your EQ modulation and distortion/saturation/extra spice effects. And resampling those. So you just gotta get a basic starting point really
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Jun 3, 2022 04:34
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Right, I figured as much - about the harmonic series being impossible to recreate given oscillators that only tune stepped by semitones. I know that any way you cut it there's a lot of work that goes into making these kinds of patches. I guess my rationale going in is that I really like my Virus and want to use it for more things instead of resorting to ITB solutions, as simple and tempting as Serum is to open up I often want to go the other way to be unique. In the past, like I said this has led to much frustration but I'm just going to have to deal with that better. As it happens, I asked on a Virus user group about the beast's wavetable oscillators, and some absolute mensch dropped these on me:  Needless to say, I'm very excited to pore over these. Hopefully I can find some discipline and actually get to WRITING poo poo again, because my rough work is VERY rough.
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Jun 3, 2022 05:10
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^ those wavetable charts are rad! the manual for the intellijel/cylonix shapeshifter has a similar section showing all the wavetable wave shapes. i prefer to do things by ear, but i often find myself looking at them when im doing some zany self patching noise stuff, especially when using one of its oscillators in LFO mode since moving house ive placed all my music gear approximately 8 inches lower so now i dont have to reach upward to turn the knobs. its done wonders for my productivity on that front, and destroyed my productivity in all other fronts. really is amazing how much difference a small change like that can make. please listen to my music and validate me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2tiEtfw0NU Mr. Sharps fucked around with this message at 07:17 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 07:15
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Mr. Sharps posted:please listen to my music and validate me. slaps 
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Jun 3, 2022 07:47
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the thing about a square wave is that you can’t really clip it since it’s just what happens when you fully clip a sine wave, so messing with the harmonic content will drastically change how it distorts. one of my favorite neuro techniques is taking a sine or triangle, and some noise or similar inharmonic content (i love my chernobylizer for this) and distorting the poo poo out of them. then you can modulate the level of the noise for a pseudo-filter effect. but also taking a reese, slapping a band pass on it to automate or modulate for movement, and then using OTT style aggressive expanding to bring the lost frequencies back but retaining the character of the movement will always be a classic. there are no rules in neuro though. just try poo poo out and see how it sounds, i’m sure the virus can make some wicked reese sounds that you can experiment with
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Jun 3, 2022 08:09
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Mr. Sharps posted:ive placed all my music gear approximately 8 inches lower so now i dont have to reach upward to turn the knobs. its done wonders for my productivity This. This is what's currently dogging me. I have a pair of Mantises bracketed together for my main eurorack setup, and it's wonderfully ergonomic under normal circumstances. But the office chair that I'm still stubbornly trying to repair (it's an ancient Steelcase Leap I picked up on CL, which go for $1k normally) has a leaky cylinder that I need to replace, but it seems to be rusted in place. Sooooo if I'm not at the lowest setting, I either slowly sink or just get suddenly drop-zoned, depending on how much WD-40-and-pipe-wrench time I've invested in it that week. And that's a problem: at my chair's lowest level, I don't have a good angle on the front flat row of modules to read the labels, and I can't really put anything with a screen on either of the bottom rows. So right now my flat row is half spacers, half modules I don't use as often. It's at the point where I've been giving thought to propping up the back of my Mantises to get a better angle, but I'm not sure how to go about that without endangering the case or needing to significantly rework my setup. So it's probably back to the pipe wrench again tonight. 
Kraven Moorhed fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 12:53
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What do I do if I think I just got scammed on Reverb? There was a Machinedrum UW listed for $800 and I jumped on it. A listing with the same device down to the serial number (which was pictured) was listed and sold two days ago (for $750 which is also fishy). The seller was in Germany and the transaction was through PayPal. I saw it within 20 minutes of listing and thought I was just getting a UW that someone absent-mindedly posted for a non-UW price. I'm so dumb. 
kidfresca fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 13:34
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Patches with jobs…that’s a good point. Each voice I’ve added to a track has had a general, vague role in the song, but IME it’s never gone much further than “this one’s for bass and sticks around the home key”, “this one goes chugga chugga like a guitar”, “this one does some chord-y things”. I suppose this is more of an arrangement question than a synthesis question, but what jobs do patches have? Is there a heuristic I can follow outside of just making everything as unique as possible on the harmonic spectrum?
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Jun 3, 2022 14:09
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Mister Speaker posted:Right, I figured as much - about the harmonic series being impossible to recreate given oscillators that only tune stepped by semitones. As a tangent, you mention having an Ultranova. You can get exact harmonics using vsync on a sine wave. Setting the vsync parameter to 0 is the fundamental. Then 16 is the second harmonic, 32 is the third; each multiple of 16 gets you further up the harmonic series.
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Jun 3, 2022 15:17
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And if you’re using Vital, it’s fun to see what happens if you tune your carrier at 0st and your modulator at -5st or 7st! Bonus points if you have another carrier at 19st or something.
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Jun 3, 2022 15:38
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I got curious and made my own neuro bass on the Ultranova. Here's the sysex if you're curious. The onboard distortion may leave something to be desired, but I was pretty happy that the series filters were up to the task. There are LFOs on touch knobs 7 and 8 so you can alternate between using the filter knob and letting an LFO take over.
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Jun 3, 2022 16:04
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Mister Speaker posted:Needless to say, I'm very excited to pore over these. Hopefully I can find some discipline and actually get to WRITING poo poo again, because my rough work is VERY rough. Mr. Sharps posted:please listen to my music and validate me. Both of these were quite enjoyable listens. Thanks for sharing, and keep it up!  fresh tunes with coffee this morning. yay!
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Jun 3, 2022 16:55
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Mr. Sharps posted:please listen to my music and validate me. Big fan of the bass as of 1:38~1:40 - it would be quite fun as the centerpiece of the composition! I do like this track despite it not necessarily being my type of music. That one section around 1:40~2:15 onwards, I heard the Genesis/Mega Drive at points and that made me go  .
Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 17:04
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Mr. Sharps posted:^ those wavetable charts are rad! the manual for the intellijel/cylonix shapeshifter has a similar section showing all the wavetable wave shapes. i prefer to do things by ear, but i often find myself looking at them when im doing some zany self patching noise stuff, especially when using one of its oscillators in LFO mode Wow, this is very nice.
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Jun 3, 2022 17:26
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Pollyanna posted:Big fan of the bass as of 1:38~1:40 - it would be quite fun as the centerpiece of the composition! I do love my megadrive bass sounds, and the digitone is imo the quickest and easiest way to get into that territory right now, though that newish megafm synth from twisted electrons is probably more authentic. Thanks for all the love folks, it does mean a lot to me and since I’m not making any money off this hobby love is all I can take!!
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Jun 3, 2022 18:39
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kidfresca posted:What do I do if I think I just got scammed on Reverb? There was a Machinedrum UW listed for $800 and I jumped on it. A listing with the same device down to the serial number (which was pictured) was listed and sold two days ago (for $750 which is also fishy). The seller was in Germany and the transaction was through PayPal. I saw it within 20 minutes of listing and thought I was just getting a UW that someone absent-mindedly posted for a non-UW price. I'm so dumb. Contact Reverb support ASAP, if you haven't already. My experiences with them have been great.
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Jun 3, 2022 18:54
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It hurts so bad guys, what a loss. His legacy will live on forever
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Jun 3, 2022 19:14
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Kraven Moorhed posted:Contact Reverb support ASAP, if you haven't already. My experiences with them have been great. Definitely do this!
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Jun 3, 2022 19:18
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sad posted:It hurts so bad guys, what a loss. Obviously the synth world has lost some legendary, influential people over the last few years, but for some reason Dave Smith dying hit me a lot harder than most. I think his work and Sequential just represent a lot of what I love about synths. My first "big" synth (ie not a Volca or little preset box style thing) was a Mopho Keys and honestly I regret selling that thing more often than any other synth.
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Jun 3, 2022 19:25
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Pollyanna posted:I suppose this is more of an arrangement question than a synthesis question, but what jobs do patches have? Is there a heuristic I can follow outside of just making everything as unique as possible on the harmonic spectrum? Categories can work - pads are for padding, i.e. filling up the spectrum. Pluck arps add a rhythmic and melodic element at the same time. Softer plucks (longer attack, filtered waveforms) in the background provide ornamentation. Lead sounds are forward and bright to put the spotlight on the melody and to draw attention to it. It is perfectly valid to just throw patches at the wall and see what sticks. Going out of your way to make everything timbrally unique and evolving at all times just results in something that’s really crowded.
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Jun 3, 2022 20:48
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Kraven Moorhed posted:Contact Reverb support ASAP, if you haven't already. My experiences with them have been great. I did. They told me I had to go through PayPal, but they saw what I described and locked down the seller's account on Reverb at least. They also reassured me that I was still covered by their protection if resolving the issue through PayPal turns ugly and to give them a call in that event. I opened a dispute with PayPal over the phone and they elevated its importance, but I have to wait 9 days for the seller to respond to the dispute with evidence. My bank says they can't do anything until it passes the pre-authorization hold, but I can fill out a form later if I need to. It may take time, but I think I'll get my money back. I just feel really stupid.
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Jun 3, 2022 21:15
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Hope all goes well with that, but I've never had a bad experience with that kind of thing with paypal. Here, just came here to post my latest find: 
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Jun 3, 2022 21:56
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I got my M8 last night, spent a few hours today putting together a little song. Really cool device, very easy to use. Particularly nice are the modulation capabilities. You can set modulation effects per note, to do stuff like turn on an LFO for specific notes to get some PWM or vibrato or whatever just for those notes. Lots of options to explore there. Another cool features is you can export one WAV file per track, which makes mastering/mixing easy if you're careful to keep instruments segregated into their own tracks. That's something the Deluge really needs. And obviously the whole flow around tracks/chains/phrases is optimized to make iterating on musical ideas really quick. I had one technical hiccup, which is the first thing I did after getting it was upgrade its firmware... but then it wouldn't boot. The manual has instructions for how to force it into recovery mode to try the upgrade again, and luckily it worked the second time. Not a great experience there. (Edit: Oh yeah the other dumb thing is it uses micro-USB instead of USB-C. C'mon......) Since it doesn't have a stellar synth engine (it sounds good, but is limited compared to traditional full-featured synths), I'm going to try exploring its sampling capabilities. The Deluge makes this fairly painful, unfortunately, so I'm curious to see how this device handles it with a real, if small, screen. (I'd apologize for the vertical video, but well, it's a vertical device!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K22ynWtCvTk ColdPie fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 22:41
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I’ve never looked at trackers, are they basically detailed, programmable sequencers?
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Jun 3, 2022 22:47
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Rolo posted:I’ve never looked at trackers, are they basically detailed, programmable sequencers? Yep. Or if one prefers to think of it another way, piano rolls written in hex.
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Jun 3, 2022 22:53
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Ugh that sounds fun.
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Jun 3, 2022 22:56
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the good thing is there are tons of free and inexpensive software trackers to mess around with to figure out if the workflow is something you’ll gel with the workflow!
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Jun 3, 2022 23:07
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Rolo posted:Ugh that sounds fun. It’s not that bad. Everything I’ve made has been in a tracker called Renoise, and I’ve been reasonably productive with it. Things go by quickly once you get good at it (I am not good at it). Laserjet 4P posted:Categories can work - pads are for padding, i.e. filling up the spectrum. Pluck arps add a rhythmic and melodic element at the same time. Softer plucks (longer attack, filtered waveforms) in the background provide ornamentation. Lead sounds are forward and bright to put the spotlight on the melody and to draw attention to it. I feel this for sure. The patches in my most recent two tracks feel kinda muddy and I wish I hadn’t gone so hard on the unison and chorus. They all kinda end up sounding the same despite having unique-ish harmonic profiles. Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Jun 4, 2022 |
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Jun 4, 2022 00:29
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JamesKPolk posted:The very basic square-harmonic thing you described sounds to me like a fixed-phase approximation of a low, resonant filter around the 3rd or 4th harmonic of a square wave pair cancelling each other's second harmonic, done w/ the minimum processing power and track instances. I was re-reading your reply and curious about this part, can you elaborate on the squares "cancelling each others' second harmonic"? Surely the squares have to be different in some way to destructively interfere, no? Are we talking subtle detuning, transposition or a change in pulse length? This sounds very doable with the Virus and shouldn't eat up much DSP at all, I'd just like to clarify that thing about the second harmonic (because like I said it seems to be a pretty key part of Underbelly's sound in the tutorial I mentioned).
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Jun 4, 2022 00:38
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Rolo posted:Ugh that sounds fun. It makes sense once you spend a couple hours at it. They all turn your qwerty keyboard into a three octave keyboard, you flip to note entry mode and type out notes. Arrows keys to move around. The effects column is a little more involved but keep the documentation up in a browser and you can get cool stuff fairly fast. Then you start to memorize the codes and it gets really fast.
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Jun 4, 2022 01:25
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Mister Speaker posted:I was re-reading your reply and curious about this part, can you elaborate on the squares "cancelling each others' second harmonic"? Surely the squares have to be different in some way to destructively interfere, no? Are we talking subtle detuning, transposition or a change in pulse length? This sounds very doable with the Virus and shouldn't eat up much DSP at all, I'd just like to clarify that thing about the second harmonic (because like I said it seems to be a pretty key part of Underbelly's sound in the tutorial I mentioned). Not transposition. Subtle detuning is what I had in mind but pulse width (being a stickler for terms here as we're talking oscillators, not gates) will also get you there. Pulse width is the wild card - you can get the same kind of cancellation that you'd do with 2 saws detuned by single digit cents, with one pulse wave w/ PWM. Or a bunch of different stuff (including PCM samples!). Depending on the mod signal. I almost went and edited this in (I knew that sentence was a stinker!) but that's an incredibly contrived series of harmonics, it almost feels like a "greatest hits" of the phase period, like a strong fundamental, then a couple clashing harmonics high enough you notice the gap. In practice w/ detuning it's much easier to do this while also cancelling the fundamental, but you don't really wanna do that for a bass patch... unless you're layering subs or something, then maybe. I think in general its less helpful to think of it like "that waveform is supposed to mimic a filtered square (or saw) minus a few harmonics" and more like "that waveform and a filtered square/saw both get me to the place I want to be, which is a tone w/ x frequency content that will distort into y, when I process it with x"
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Jun 4, 2022 01:31
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JamesKPolk posted:Not transposition. Ah cool, definitely going to give this a try - and yes of course I meant to say pulse width, drat it's right there in the name. :P Yeah I'm not too worried about losing the fundamental, either. A lot of these kinds of patches call for a clean sine sub underneath anyway, since it's generally accepted that as soon as you start messing with detuning you're going to muck up the low end and that's obviously not what you want in a dancefloor environment. I've heard <120Hz decorrelation done in precisely one song, and while it sounded cool on my monitors it still made me kind of queasy.
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Jun 4, 2022 04:45
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Rolo posted:I’ve never looked at trackers, are they basically detailed, programmable sequencers? The story of trackers is pretty awesome. Mister Speaker posted:my rough work is VERY rough. Didn't yet get a chance to listen through, but just clicking around it sounds really good. I'll dl it and listen in full at the gym maybe.
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Jun 4, 2022 09:44
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ColdPie posted:I got my M8 last night, spent a few hours today putting together a little song. Really cool device, very easy to use. Particularly nice are the modulation capabilities. You can set modulation effects per note, to do stuff like turn on an LFO for specific notes to get some PWM or vibrato or whatever just for those notes. Lots of options to explore there. Another cool features is you can export one WAV file per track, which makes mastering/mixing easy if you're careful to keep instruments segregated into their own tracks. That's something the Deluge really needs. And obviously the whole flow around tracks/chains/phrases is optimized to make iterating on musical ideas really quick. It's micro USB because it's got a teensy inside. Imo braids sounds great as does the FM engine. You can make entire tracks only using samples, and the depth available is impressive and tables are incredibly big brain. I highly suggest watching the meet-ups uploaded on the dirtywave YouTube channel, good examples of the depths you can go. P.s. you can buy an anbernic 351, a teensy and run handheld headless 
Google Butt fucked around with this message at 10:50 on Jun 4, 2022 |
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Jun 4, 2022 10:46
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Google Butt posted:It's micro USB because it's got a teensy inside. Imo braids sounds great as does the FM engine. I'm curious, did someone port m8c to the anbernic 351 or did you build it yourself for the device? I looked into this a bit for one of my linux handhelds but was unsure it would work so never ordered the teensy.
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