Beiträge von dark_fader

Zitat von Shesh

Why not just create a multi patch using 16 parts (16x3oscs = 48 oscs!) to generate the required partials > record > send back into Virus to filter/apply fx etc?

A little convoluted but still seems doable.

Awesome. After a quick scan through the manual I found the feature you're talking about, 'Input Mode'. In theory that means I can use any synth I like to generate a waveform to be shaped by the Virus filter section (and ring modulator by the looks of it). For monophonic sounds that could work - and no recording would be required. (I could pipe a soft synth through a spare output and into the Virus.)

Nice. Now if I can sort out the hideous MIDI timing issues I get when using my sound card, I shall play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rD1gQHzc10

Listen from 1:58 to 2:44.

Although I think there's some cheating going on...

All I can suggest is trying the SPDIF. Preferably without buying a new cable. it helped me, although the MIDI timing still wobbles around like a drunkard. It is regularly up to a 32nd out, and changes all the time.

With both SPDIF cables connected I seemed to be getting a timing loop or something. The virus was complaining about SPDIF timing errors and the sounds would literally detune by several semitones as I played. I need to find out how to set the virus as source.

Love the virus though. Having access to the controls in hardware makes shaping a sound as I produce much more of an organIc process.

Dunno how smooth I can make it with the octave shifts...

Automation data seems to be different from MIDI. For example, the sequencer knows the name of the parameter and the type of control (which it wouldn't with MIDI) and VSTs allow a finer degree of control than the 128 steps MIDI allows.

I can set up MIDI tracks to send to a specific MIDI channel and record MIDI data I create, but when I grab a knob on the Virus, the VST track just grabs the named automation data. I could set it up to use MIDI in from the Virus maybe...

There's a few long, involved discussions about multi-timbral instruments on Ableton forums and the external instrument plug-in, which seems to have been created after the Ableton tutorial project was made. I'll experiment.

By the way this does seem to be a problem for Cubase users as well, if some of the posts I've read are anything to go by.

Zitat von Ruari

This isn't correct, there's no difference in the amount of tracks in your arrange window if you have 5 software instruments or 1 multi timbral instrument using 5 channels. Your mixer window will look different as there will only be 1 channel strip (or up to 3 if you are using the multi out) instead of 5 separate ones - ie. less clutter.

Each lane can have it's own automation on it so that is no harder to keep track of than working with separate instruments.

I don't know how Abelton works, so the above might not apply but workflow is not a problem when using the TI within Logic.

OK, firstly the Ableton tutorial song shows an extra track used just for audio and the VST, so 9 MIDI tracks + 1 audio/VST track. (And another audio track for outs 3/4). For all its lovliness, Ableton does tent to clutter.

Secondly, even in the tutorial project, recording a knob turn on the Virus creates automation data in the lane for the VST plug-in. So yeah, all automation arrives in the same lane, which I can see getting very irritating.

Is there a way to get Ableton to divert automation data (different from MIDI data) to a different MIDI channel strip? It kinda sounds like Logic has support for multi-timbral VSTs while Ableton doesn't. (This could well be the case - you don't get many multi-timbral VSTs.)

Zitat von AtonyB

PowerCore managed to work with several instances, but i suppose they were more independant and it never worked that great anyway.

LOL! Yeah, my two Powercore cards (with Virus unlimited) have been sitting in a box gathering dust for years now. I just realised that I was spending all my time hunting drop-outs, missing channels, clicks and pops and none of it making music.

Am I a glutton for punishment? ;^)

Zitat von AtonyB

Either way I think its better to have it all in one place, why is this a problem to some people?

From a few threads I've looked over on this topic, it seems that the main issues are:

1: Cosmetic/workflow - having an extra channel in the sequencer adds clutter and the whole thing behaves differently to VST instruments. Specifically:

2: Workflow/usability - automation all happens within one track so there is a separation of MIDI and automation data. Also, the fact that all automation data is on one track is confusing, fiddly, time consuming and difficult to work with.

Also:

3: All the audio is lumped together into one channel (or two or three), so different parts can't be processed individually.

I've mainly been learning how to use the hardware interface since I got the Virus, so I haven't tried sequencer automation yet. I will be interested to see how the different instances are handled in Ableton.

Point 3 is, sadly, a hardware limitation. Point 1 is necessary due to the hardware limitation.

The only way out I can see for point 2 is a 'virtual part' VST plugin, which sends and receives automation and MIDI note data for a single Virus part... But not audio. I have no idea what nightmare code would be needed to make that happen while maintaining a smooth USB connection throughout and honouring the VST protocol.

Be aware that you can break into a Kensington lock with a ballpoint pen lid. In a few seconds.

It is not in any way secure.

I posted this in the feature requests thread so I won't repeat myself too much.

Using sMexoscope and my ears, I couldn't see or hear any significant difference between the Octavius waves (at any octave) and the Virus classic saw. But playing around I found that some of the other wavetable oscillators were lovely, fat and rich sounding.

Octavius looks like a useful wavetable, but I don't think it's emulating vintage oscillators - I'd expect radical differences in wave shapes. But I'm more than happy to be proved wrong if you can point out those differences.

Lol! Darth Fader would be a great name, you're right. Ah well, too late now.

If your sound card has SPDIF in, try getting a nice, fat cable and connecting the Virus 'out' SPDIF RCA to the sound card 'in'. Then hunt around in your sound card settings to see if you can drive the sound card clock from the SPDIF in. (Switch 'clock' from internal to SPDIF in). I'm on an Emu 1212m, but I think all sound cards with SPDIF should have this feature.

The difference, for me, was incredible. Like night and day. YMMV, of course.

Also, far from losing an 'out', you'd get a digital signal from the Virus piped straight in to your sound card so you can eliminate the DAC/ADC conversion losses (and any interference) you'd get from doing it with an analogue cable.

Go the other way and presumably you could use your SPDIF out from the sound card to feed the vocoder and atomizer through the Virus SPDIF in... But I'm not 100% sure of this. I'm still trying to find a way to do that with the Virus running as my sound card.

Thanks guys.

Glad to hear you're getting good results with a Creative card, AtonyB. It does give me some hope. Do you mind me asking which one?

Flabberbob, that sounds great, but I haven't found a way to do this with Ableton yet. Which DAW are you using that allows this? If I have a copy I may be able to at least see if it's causing any problems.

Zitat von bobborries

The Octavius Wavetable is comprised of 6 different Vintage Sawtooths, each one an octave above the next. The wavetable fades very smoothly from the lowest octave all the way up to 2' octave. I thought all the wavetables were based on sine harmonics, but this is not true. When it's index is modulated by an LFO, you get the most amazing pad sounds.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://www.bobborries.com/Tutorials/OctaviusExample.jpg]

Below is a Sonogram of the swept wavetable, left to right is time, at the bottom is low frequencies and as you make your way to the top the frequencies go higher and higher. Sawtooths contain all harmonics so you see all harmonic bands at the beginning, the dark black line at the bottom (C1) indicates fundamental frequency of the perceived note, the lines get thinner the higher you go up, and the upper harmonics get fainter. At C2 the line is darkest, same for the rest, C3,C4,C5 and finally C6.

[Blockierte Grafik: http://www.bobborries.com/Tutorials/OctaviusSonogram.jpg]

Other vintage Oscillators to try are Eat Pulse, a crazy PWM type sound and Filtered Sqr, a filtered square wave (TR-606?), there's others and I'll have a detailed PDF examining all the wavetables, as well as the spectral waveshapes coming soon.

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Are you sure about all this? I don't want to be a damp squib but I had a little play with the Octavius wavetable last night.

Firstly (obviously) the blend between waveforms is only as smooth as the interpolation knob determines.

Secondly, in an A/B listening test, all octaves of the octavius, when pitched down to match, sounded nearly identical to the classic saw. If anything there was a minute touch less buzz in the octavius.

Thirdly, a little time with the sMexoscope ( http://bram.smartelectronix.com/plugins.php?id=4 - it's free and very useful) showed that all the octavius wave shapes looked very similar to each other - not the wildly differing saw-ish shapes you'd expect from a collection of vintage synths. They also looked very similar to the Virus classic. The only difference seemed to be a slightly more exaggerated high frequency spike at the bottom corner of the classic waveform - which would explain the small amount of extra buzz.

From this I conclude that the octavius is simply a Virus classic saw, resampled or re-engineered for the wavetable. The very slight difference I put down to the wavetable processing - or perhaps aliasing differences in the algorithm.

I can see why they would do it as well - the octave blending feature gives some interesting sonic possibilities while sampling the classic oscillator keeps the character of the Virus.

(On the other hand, if you ditch any requirement for a waveform to be identical to a particular classic synth there are plenty of interesting, punchy, and/or buzzy waveforms to be found buried away in the wavetables. So thank you for getting me playing with them. )

Overall, it sounds like there's a thirst on the forum for vintage wave shapes. Adding a few wavetable sets containing the saw/square/triangle/sine/etc. waves of some of the synth classics from history would make a lot of people happy, I think. I could well be one of them.

So +1 from me for classic synth oscillators in the wavetables.

If that's true then it's a bit of a shame. But I can see the logic in it.

Looking at it the other way round, perhaps an interesting feature to add would be a toggle to allow one of the oscillators to go down to LFO frequencies.

Edited to add: Ooh, looks like you can.

Zitat von AtonyB

Yes it is, of course, possible to have a bank of oscillators, each modelling each partial - I have no idea if that is how Harmour works (you could just work in frequency domain)

Unless the press release and instruction manual are lying then yes, that is how it works. They could be lying of course, I haven't decompiled the code or anything. But they call it an additive synth, describe it as using an oscillator per partial and, indeed, additive synthesis is defined as the use of an oscillator per partial (unless you can show me a source more reputable than SoS and Wikipedia which supports your definition. Perfectly possible to do of course, I just haven't seen it yet.)

Zitat von AtonyB

- but in the case of the Virus, it has 80 voices, so you can guess how quickly you would run out of voices...

Unless, maybe, it's possible to optimise a simple sine wave oscillator in a way that you can't with, say, an oscillator capable of pulse width, wave shape, triangle, saw, square etc.

Zitat von AtonyB

Be comforted by the fact that using wavetable synthesis and the variants on the Virus you can get a lot of the harmonic modulation effects you might want from there

Having a wavetable oscillator isn't like having an additive engine. It's lovely to have and there may be ways to get some similar sounds (depending on the wavetables you're given) but it's not the same.

Zitat von AtonyB

and using the formant shift you can get a lot of great sounds which are easy to keep in check.

All of the Virus features are capable of giving you a lot of great sounds. The virus is a great synth, that is why I shelled out a possibly unwise amount of money on it. But this thread is about feature requests, surely, not listing existing features and saying how great they are?

If I want a sound that an additive synth will do well, I'll go to Razor or Harmor.

Zitat von AtonyB

Personally I'm not that impressed with Harmor, it was going cheap and I wasn't persuaded, but I parted with over £1000 for the Virus, so what does that tell you?

Horses and courses. I love 'em both and I ended up buying it.

Thanks!

That article sounds oddly familiar, especially the crack about the Hammond Tonewheel Additive Synthesizer. It could well be one of the very articles I read about different types of synthesis many years back when I had a SoS sub.

Again, it seems to reinforce my understanding of additive synthesis and in particular the architecture of Razor and Harmor. They appear to have cracked the idea of using a single osc for each harmonic, each independently controllable.

The more I think about it though, the more I think that an additive engine would utterly swamp the resources available to the Virus.

If it's possible (and the existence of the 'FM' knob would suggest that it is), it would be nice and useful for creating interesting sonic textures. I can immediately imagine a situation where a siren type sound slowly sped up to become its own rising metallic texture. Build-up heaven. Unfortunately at the moment FM can either be carried out at LFO frequencies or audio frequencies, but not both from the same modulation source.

Making it available to all modulation destinations would be a natural 'why the hell not?' next step.

This is all fascinating stuff, but come on, *you know what I mean*. Both Harmor and Razor show you a graphic representation of the partials as you manipulate the processors and oscillators. They can do this because each partial is modelled individually. Unlike with FM or RM, where such modelling isn't necessary and everything can be carried out using simple analogue components if desired.

(I believe audio imports are converted into their corresponding internal partial representations before hitting the synthesis engine in Harmor.)

So basically, I've found this particular partial modelling technique to produce an interesting and powerful sonic palette. If you want to create the name 'spectral remapping' for it then fine... Although I don't think the phrase quite does it justice and... well, 'additive synthesis' perfectly describes what I mean already, according to Wikipedia for one:

: Additive synthesis is a technique of sound synthesis that creates musical timbre by explicitly adding sinusoidal overtones together.
: The timbre of an instrument is composed of multiple harmonic or inharmonic partials (individual sine waves), of different frequencies and amplitudes, that change over time. Additive synthesis
: allows the emulation of a given tone or sound by giving control over the frequency and amplitude of each individual harmonic or partial. In general, each harmonic generator has its own
: customizable amplitude envelope and instantaneous frequency function, creating a realistic, dynamic sound that changes over time.

Specifically this:

:Additive synthesis allows the emulation of a given tone or sound by giving control over the frequency and amplitude of each individual harmonic or partial. In general, each harmonic generator [partial] has its own customizable amplitude envelope and instantaneous frequency function

Have I done enough yet to narrow down what I mean to you?

And rather than splitting hairs with terminology or using inappropriately broad categorisations to imply that the Virus does this in some form already(!), what do you think of the idea of the feature? Do you think that the Virus can already do everything that it could if it had an additive engine component?

By the way, where did you get your definition of additive from? As I said, everything I've ever read about additive synthesis agrees with the Wikipedia entry, and I've been interested in synthesis for a fair while now. You obviously know your stuff, so what's your source?

> Additive synthesis takes base oscillators and creates new harmonics with its processing. FM and RM do this.
OK, if you like. We're getting hung up on semantics though. FM and RM simply aren't what I'm talking about. They work in a completely different way and they produce very different sounds.

Based on all I've read regarding different synthesis techniques to date, I think of 'FM' and 'additive synthesis' as different classes of synthesis. What I call 'additive synthesis' uses the addition of many partials - all sine waves and all individually malleable - to create the final waveform. FM, RM and I guess PM are all carried out using the multiplication of audio frequency waveforms, often complex ones.

What would you specifically call what I refer to as 'additive synthesis', just so we're using the same language? If, for example, you didn't want to lump it in with FM and RM?

> Also, frequency domain manipulation is not so intensive, thats how digital vocoders work. You can quite comfortably take the FFT ...

But rough FFT approximations aren't how additive engines work. They model the individual sine waves in order to give that characteristically crisp, digital sound. I do know that even a simple additive patch on Harmor or Razor will eat CPU like it's going out of fashion. Could be bad programming, but I suspect the calculations are intense.

Interestingly, given your description of subtractive, both Harmor and Razor would fit the bill. Looking at the interface, they use complex oscillators at the start of the signal chain and everything afterwards alters the frequency components. The difference is the engine and the new sonic options allowed to you thanks to the ability to play with individual sine waves.

The Virus isn't an FM synth. It gives a limited FM option so you can add an FM flavour to sounds. I'm suggesting a similar thing when it comes to additive synthesis. The ability to add an additive engine component to the signal path to add some of its flavour to the synthesis.

I didn't think of FM and RM as additive, more as waveform modulation techniques. (I see an additive engine as being one where the final output waveform is constructed from a number of sine waves of different pitches, phases and amplitudes. FM and RM take existing waveforms, sometimes already complex, and multiply them.)

I think the uniqueness of the operations within the additive engine come from the way that the resultant sound is utterly, unashamedly digital. The fact that the algorithm is playing with sine waves rather than complex waveforms makes for a particular kind of precision. Also, it's possible to think up additive tools which work in ways no analogue-style filter or effect could. Detuning selected harmonics is one. The 'filters' and effects you find on Razor and Harmor can make some remarkable sounds.

I'd love to hear how all that works as a stage before the rich analogue emulation of the Virus. But like I said, it's a lot of work - and would probably take a hell of a lot of DSP power.