4.5.3.00 LFO strange behaviour [SOLVED]

Yesterday I was working on a project, the Virus was playing away nicely & one of the patches I had made was making use of all 3 LFOs merrily modulating away without a care. When I finished up last night, I saved my Logic project & this morning I've came back to it to finish the whole thing off.

On my first complete run through the project today, things didn't sound right & I put it down to the phase of LFO 3 being out compared to how I left it last night. It's a triangle on a 16 bar cycle & I had left it so that this particular patch wasn't coming in until bar 17, the LFO was at the lowest point of it's cycle - everything was how I needed it.

Today I initially thought that the phase of the LFO had moved either 12 bars forward or 4 bars back depending on how you look at it, no problem I thought, I'll just adjust the start point of the project. It still wasn't sounding right, so now I'm scratching my head, all the settings are as I left them last night, I don't know what's happened.

I stopped playing through the project & I was just pressing a key down while I thought about what was wrong when the LFO "jumped" to the bottom of it's cycle, exactly like a sawtooth would, but this is set to triangle - there shouldn't be any jumping.

Now, here's the strange bit, once it's jumped to the bottom of the cycle, if I keep holding the key then it's acting as it should, if I let go of the key then press it again the same thing happens. I've tried switching through different shapes then back to triangle to see if that helps, but it doesn't make any difference.

I haven't tried swapping the lfos around yet to see if this is happening with all of them, I came to post this here first to see if anyone else has experienced this or knows of a work around. I'm on 4.5.3.00 & apart from the soft knob destinations I've mentioned elsewhere on the forum this is the only hiccup which is having an impact on me being able to work that I'm having.

@ Marc - If you have any vacancies for quality assurance testers then please don't hesitate to give me a shout.

I don't know if it's my Virus that's broken or what, what is happening now is when I tried to remake the patch from the Init patch when I'm trying to assign either lfo2 directly to the filter 1 cutoff or lfo 2 or 3 to the filter 1 cutoff via the matrix it has started panning the sound from left to right

I'd really appreciate if someone would try these settings out with VC to see if it's just my machine or a larger problem. It will only take you a few minutes to try this out. I'm using a TI2 desktop by the way.

Start from Init

Osc 1 classic pulse semitone -12
osc 2 classic saw semitone -12 detune 32
sub osc square lvl 84
osc 1/2/ balance 0
osc vol 0
Unison twin detune 41, pan spread 58.6%
filter link off cutoff link off, balance -64, ser 4
filter 1 cutoff 58 reso 20
lfo 1 speed 71 pw 1+2 28.1%

You should now have a nice dirty bass tone, here's where my machine starts acting strange.

lfo 3 clock 16/1
matrix slot choose any one you want, mine all behave the same way for this example I'll say slot 2
source lfo3 either unipolar or bipolar, it makes no difference. My original patch was bipolar.
filter 1 cutoff +35 any amount will do but that's what I set mine at.

Now at this point, instead of hearing the filter 1 cutoff gently opening & closing over 16 bars I'm hearing the patch pan from left to right

I also had lfo2 modulating the filter1 cutoff set to about -40% synced to 1/4 for a little pumping effect but I'm getting the same panning style behaviour but with a bit of randomness thrown in.

I'm going to try this standalone to see if that makes any difference, I've made an identical patch in Massive & it is doing exactly what I thought it should be doing before I started. I had to do this because I thought I was going crazy before.

If you do try this, please post here to let me know what happens.

Thanks in advance

In standalone, the lfos will modulate the filter 1 cutoff but they won't stay in sync - I thought it might have just been lfo 2 that couldn't stay in sync but when I changed lfo3 to 1/4 it too was all over the shop, but wherever it was getting it's timing from lfo 2 & 3 were locked together.

Right, I've stopped tinkering with it standalone & I'm back in VC now.

I've rolled back to 4.2.07 & reset my machine & it's still acting up, from all the testing I've been doing I think it has something to do with Unison being used. With unison set to off, things seem ok I can leave it running for a while with no errors, as soon as I turn unison on things start going wrong almost instantly. It seems like the lfo's in the left & right channels are 180 out of phase with each other.

I switched lfo 3 to a square wave set to 1/4beat & the sound was jumping left to right on the beat, occasionally it would correct itself but within a couple of beats it was back out of phase again. This seems to repeat itself indefinitely.

Zitat von flabberbob

I actually followed your instructions with my 4.5.3, and no, you're not going crazy. I've also added a step to set LFO3 mono (so that the amount would be linked to the MIDI bar count), and one thing to stress is that when just playing around "offline" it sounds as it should, but once pressing "play" or "record" in the DAW it starts doing that strange panning thing - and setting the unison count to an even number doesn't help, as it did in that old 4.2 obvious unison bug... Marc...? Jörg...? Help...?

Thanks for testing & reporting back flabberbob.

My initial response to reading your post was one of bewilderment, part of me is pleased that it's not my particular Virus that's at fault, but a larger part of me is disappointed that our machines have this problem. I'm not getting too carried away when I say that I can't work with my Virus while it has a problem like this, if all our machines have the same problem then this is a serious malfunction.

My offer to Marc still stands, if he has a vacancy for a quality assurance tester, I would do it.

I've just downloaded a load of betas & public releases to try out, I'm hoping that I don't have to go too far back or else it'll be goodbye fancy choruses & hello again dodgy arp timing

I'll post my findings here later on.

Well, thankfully, it looks like we don't have to go too far back. On initial testing 4.5.1.15 seems to function normally.

LFO's behaving normally - check
New choruses - check
Arp timing nice & tight - check

Fingers crossed it stays like that

Thanks for testing that & reporting back djantimatter, 4.5.1.15 is still available to download if you wanted to roll back.

I've emailed Jorg about it but there's probably nothing he can do until Monday at the earliest.

I'm having to abandon my Virus until I can get some official help, it seems that 4.5.1.15 is not the answer as I can't play the project through from start to finish without the BPM light going crazy & throwing any lfo action way off course.

I'm no further forward than where I was on Friday morning, it's been a rollercoaster of emotions for me the past few days ranging from frustration to bewilderment to joy & now I've gone full circle & got back to frustration again. I'm done with testing things for now, almost 3 full days of studio time has been flushed down the pan with this problem.

I just want to get on & produce some music here, I don't think I'm being too unreasonable.

Jorg

You sir, are 100% correct here.

Zitat von jhuettner

Since you are using UNISON in your sound example please also check this again with the LFO Phase Offset for UNISON being set to 0, since this is set to -64 by default and in fact will cause the LFOs to run on different phases in UNISON. This in fact will cause the "panning" effect, which in fact is not a panning effect but the different Filter modulation the right and left side are at. The moment I set the LFO Phase Offset to 0, both sides modulate again at the same speed.

I did indeed make a "schoolboy error" but in a small attempt to redeem myself slightly, I had almost figured it out by Friday night

Zitat

…from all the testing I've been doing I think it has something to do with
Unison being used. With unison set to off, things seem ok I can leave
it running for a while with no errors, as soon as I turn unison on
things start going wrong almost instantly. It seems like the lfo's in
the left & right channels are 180 out of phase with each other.

I had failed to see that when Unison was activated a 2nd menu page becomes available on the hardware, the 2nd error on my part was failing to turn the page of the manual whilst looking up Unison - had I noticed either of these two things I would have been met by the Unison LFO Phase Offset parameter.

I can't believe I've been stumped by something so simple for 3 whole days…

Thanks to all who tried to help me out with this.

Something was updated/changed relating to Unison after 4.5.1.15 & that's probably why the LFO phase is different between that OS & 4.5.3.00

I don't know why it's different when the DAW is playing & when it's
not either, but I'm not going to worry too much about it right now - all
I know is that it's been working fine for me since yesterday & I'm
very happy about it, I've nearly completed the track I was working on when all this started happening, if I start playback from a random place then
sometimes it takes a few bars to figure out where in the cycle it should
be & it might "jump" into position but I can live with that.

Zitat

Could it be linked with the LFOs mono setting? And how does the LFO's
init phase influence things? There's more experimenting to be done...

Haha, by the time we are done we will be the resident Unison/LFO specialists. One thing's for sure, if this issue ever comes up again we'll be able to point someone in the right direction straight away. A little further up the never ending learning curve we go…