Recharged batteries and coming back to work

Sorry all, that not much happened in the last year, but I had some issues to deal with, which did not give me the time to continue further developments and maintain the page.

I will access my existing modules and finalize some, which are in the pipeline, to hopefully provide you some more great fun with your *logue devices.

Cheers,

Pete

I earned myself a MinilogueXD

I want to thank everyone, who contributed to my first goal, that I finally can (or could) buy a minilogue xd from the donations.

Ok, I have to admitt, that I treated myself to a plologue 16 and am happy with it and also happy with the possibility of extended testing on that machine.

Another very important thing to me is feedback on the oscillators and effects which I provide.

Unfortunately I get very little feedback but from the number of downloads it seems, like a lot of people at least gave them a shot.

Any feedback is valuable for me to further improve my stuff or to come up with new things.

Thank you all. And the next updates are planned.

CZ reloaded…

I am working on an improved version of the CAINCZ.

The envelope will have more impact on the phase distortion and also the ‘saw loop’ envelope type is now working… (I would have fixed this earlier, if someone had dropped a word 😉 )

Due to refactoring I was able to free some capacity to have two parallel lanes of synthesis running.

But this leads me to the following question:

How should I expose the new parameters and options, so that it is actually usable for you?

A new Challenge

My brother Mike continuously supports me by providing his great artwork to to give the user units an identity.

He came up with the first cartridge design, which has the look and feel of an early 80s computer cartrige, inspired by the Commodore 64 and design elements of the Casio CZ synthesizers.

Then, when I described my idea of an oscillator, which emulates breaking glass, he immediately started to work on the next one.

It took him 2 days to finalize the Cain++ design after I started to outline my idea of my Karplus-Strong type oscillator. I am absolutely amazed with what he did.

By the time he finished it, he approached me with the following:

“Up until now I created desigs which match the sound character of your work. Let’s turn this thing around. I wonder with what kind of oscillator you come up with for this:

Well, what can I say?

Challenge accepted!

Update available for the CAIN CZ

I have managed to ban the artifacts on the CZ if you are using the shape knob. In addition I used the opportunity to add two more features. You now can change the carrier wave from sine to a number of waveshapes. This adds somtimes a subtle or a strong change of timbre to the sound. In addition a key tracking feature is added to shape the sound, by defining to which extend the distortion should react.

You might want to try the following patch ideas:

Sag Ja

ShapePhase Distortion1o’clock
Shift ShapeResonance6-7o’clock
Param 1Wave1value
Param 2Carrier24value
Param 3Env Type1value
Param 4Env Modulation-50value
Param 5Env Speed-42value
Param 6Key Track100value

You might have to tweak it a bit, but I think you get the general idea.

Trumpet

ShapePhase Distortion6-7o’clock
Shift ShapeResonance6-7o’clock
Param 1Wave1value
Param 2Carrier1value
Param 3Env Type5value
Param 4Env Modulation100value
Param 5Env Speed-22 – +9value
Param 6Key Track100value
CASIO CZ style trumpet sound

If you are trying the above on a mini- or prologue, I would be very happy to receive some feedback.

The Krystal is available now.

A big thank you to everyone who contributed their ideas and thoughts in the last development phase. They really bring great value to the now available version 1.0.1 of the oscillator.

Fortunately I was able to implement some (or maybe almost all) of them.

It would be great, if you could share your patches and ideas on how you actually apply the Krystal in your projects.

For a start:

Breaking Glass
ShapePosition7-8 o’clock
Shift ShapeTimbre5 o’clock
Parameter 1Env Mod92
Parameter 2Env Speed97
Parameter 3Attack1
Parameter 4Harmony5
Parameter 5HiPass1
Parameter 6Decay33

The KRYSTAL is coming…

For the KRYSTAL my vision is to build an oscillator, which is capable of capturing the different phases of an object, which is being shattered into pieces.

I imagine the initial chaotic sound, when all the pieces are very close to each other to be chaotic and that the collision of the objects will disrupt the natural decay of each other, to be very suitable for percussive sounds.

As we move along the timeline these interactions will be less, so the already shattered pieces will have more time to decay.

I am assuming an infinite room for this, so there will not be a sudden stop phase, where all shards end up on the floor with a thumping, non harmonic sound.

Due to the processor limitations of the NTS-1, which I own, I had to reduce the number of fractured pieces to 6.

But I am emulating more, by changing the size of the pieces….

Nevertheless, I hope, if you use this sound on a polyphonic synth (which I cannot afford at the moment and why I am asking for a donation), then you will have the illusion of much more.

When ever a crystal slot is free, it is re-triggered with a random initial volume and a random pitch. (Where the random pitch is taken out of a table with currently 8 slots with different musical intervals ranging from a few cents off to +2 octaves)

I am especially interested in comments concerning:

  • which kind of intervals should be available for the crystals
  • is an envelope needed to control the shape, which is the proximity of the crystals
  • what kind of envelope for the shape would be needed? Would decay and sustain be sufficient?
  • shift shape controls the timbre of the crystals … should I add discrete steps here and if so, which ones?
  • what other controls would you like to have?