Finally: Venom VB-303 v1.00

[Tuth]

Thats a 303 "emu" why dont talk about differences between the real TB and the emulated one's sequencer behaviour? The piano roll question is boring, and can use any DAW's piano rolls if anyone want it in midi mode.

https://soundcloud.com/tuth/blade

[sharke]

Can't be bothered to read the whole 25 page thread so apologies if I'm repeating what others have said here.

I'm using VB-303 in Sonar X2 and it works great. The biggest problem as I'm sure many have mentioned is getting the MidiPlay mode to unlock - I mean yes it's a pain to have to enter those codes and from a software design angle it's pure madness to deliberately make a part of your program frustrating to the end user. But I'm prepared to do it. The problem with it is of course that it often takes 4 or 5 attempts at entering the code for it to unlock. This is kind of adding insult to injury, and it p!sses me off every time I open my DAW, but HEY it's a free plug so the author is not obliged to give a single damn about any of this! Having said that, I'd gladly pay a few bucks for a version with the MidiPlay unlocked by default.

Oh man, I tried the sequencer, I put the effort it and learned it....and it works great...but it is against everything I believe in to deliberately make things harder for myself, so MIDI it is....sorry, that's just human nature! I'm used to the piano roll, I can fly around it, I can get ideas from head to computer in no time at all with it, and it's as easy as pie to get this thing rocking via MIDI. The accents, the slides....no trouble at all.

I do however experience some weirdness with slides and MIDI. If I change the destination note of a slide within the piano roll view, the slide stops working. I actually have to delete the "from" note and enter it again. I really have no idea how VB-303 knows that I've deleted and replaced the "from" note while the transport was stopped, but then again I really have no idea about anything. Bottom line is it works, it has quirks and frustrations but it's free so I'm not going to make a big deal out of it. If these issues were fixed I would quite gladly pay for it.

As for the sound, well I never did have a 303 and I wasn't even making music back in the acid house days but I was certainly listening to the tunes, and to my ear this sounds every bit as fat and growly. Without wanting to wade through 25 pages of thread, can anyone give me a quick statement as to how they think it compares with Phoscyon sound wise? I was literally just about to drop the $$$'s when I found this. I still might because of the extra features of Phoscyon (and the lack of bizarre restrictions), but I would like to hear someone maybe say "don't bother dude...you're wasting your money." I downloaded the demo but of course MIDI triggering is disabled and I wasn't about to sit and learn the sequencer just for the sake of demoing it.

[sharke]

- the piano-roll is too different

so if you know exactly what pattern you wanna program, and you know these "rules" - sure you can use the piano-roll
however, once you want to modify this pattern or experiment (hunting for happy accidents) you can see how the piano-roll becomes a pain
normal people would mess up the notes and break those rules and end up with something that doesn't sound like a 303 pattern

that's exactly where the sequencer comes to the rescue
it makes it easy to experiment with the patterns without breaking the rules, nor forcing you to understand them.. you only have to learn how to use it, just like you have to learn your DAW's sequencer

I would disagree somewhat with this - for many of us, modifying patterns and coming up with new ones and "happy accidents" has become second nature with the piano-roll. It's just a different process. For instance, let me give a recent example of my workflow with the VB-303:

I came across a great acid-like pattern by drawing notes in the piano-roll semi-randomly - in that I didn't care about exact pitches, but instead placed notes in "ballpark" locations according to a vague "high-low" groove I had in my head that seemed quite acidy. In other words, I sketched out a shape in the piano-roll, and the tonality that resulted from it was quite weird, but it nonetheless had a groove to it. When you listen to a lot of those early acid patterns, they were quite atonal - lots of b9ths, dim5ths and aug11ths for example. It gave the music an edge.

So then I removed a couple of the notes here and there, lengthened others, and added a couple of slides. Again, purely randomly. Nothing at all like sitting at a keyboard and translating musical ideas from my head like a pianist would. Some modifications sounded bad, others worked. By a process of selection, I eventually came up with a pretty great sounding pattern. From there it was easy to hear where the accents should land to make it swing.

So then I fired up a sound in Massive and came up with a housey synth riff. I had to think about what kind of key (if any) the 303 pattern suggested, and purely by accident I found a couple of chords that fit. There were a couple of notes in the 303 pattern that needed to be moved up or down a semitone to make it really work, but again I discovered that purely through experimentation.

So then I figured I would add variation by modulating the key of the synth riff. I moved everything up a tone. And the 303 pattern still worked, but one or two of the notes got shoved around a little bit in order to fit the new key. But the root note stayed the same. I also lengthened a couple more notes and changed the rhythm toward the end of the pattern. Again, this was all quite random, like a monkey at a typewriter. After much random experimentation, and a lot of rejects, I came across something that sounded quite wonderful to my ears.

What I'm trying to say is, a lot of the creative process that you see as being unique to the nature of the 303's sequencer is also possible in its own way in the piano roll. "Happy accidents" are not limited to the 303 sequencer - they also happen, for many of us, in the DAW. Heck, they also happen on conventional musical instruments. Some of my best guitar ideas have come about through moving my fingers around quite thoughtlessly and doing it enough until something interesting happens. Pretty sure a lot of jazz pianists work the same way.

I appreciate your point about the internal sequencer being the "authentic" way to work, and your plug would not be anywhere complete without it, but there are those of us who are working with the same "happy accident" philosophy in our DAWs, only we're doing it in a way that is easier for us, and we're not necessarily out to recreate the original sounds of acid with any authenticity. Just my $0.02, hope you don't mind!

[Eleventh]

The little noise I actually managed to get out of this thing sounded great, and actually got me excited about the 303 sound again! Too bad that such a promising instrument is totally ruined by the GUI & workflow. I'm not sure which screen resolution you used to create this thing but I can't see a damn thing when using 1920. I thought I could at least use it with MIDI, but the midiplay mode must be some sick joke by the dev.. at least in bridged mode the whole thing resets if I press play in the DAW, and requires me to enter the code again...

[antto]

sharke: surely sometimes it doesn't accept the code - that's really a bug which was not intended, it annoys me too, i looked thru it and couldn't see why it happens, but i was too lazy to run the debugging setup again, so i left it this way

there will not be a payware version, it's free

see i had my own workflow in my DAW too, i made some specific style of tracks (good or bad doesn't matter)

now with this sequencer - it totally changed my workflow, and i make totally different style of tracks
i first start with the 303 line(s) and build on top, not the other way around

again, whether that's good or bad is subjective
the fact is - i like it and i don't lose anything
i can make tracks like i did before, or go this new route which i'm liking as well

i had much more trouble when i had the x0xb0x in the beginning without any kind of sync to the computer, i had to pre-record the x0x line to wav, then build the track around it, to find that the pattern wasn't ideal and start over again


Eleventh: 1152x864 or something like that
if it resets when you press Play in the daw - that's very bad, it's rebooting the whole plugin
i haven't promised anything, it's what it is, it's not your only option you know ;]


now as i rewrote n0nx0x, i see that the sequencer in the VB-303 has a big flaw in the internal pattern format, i limited n0nx0x all the ways the real thing is limited to, including the octave range - and i like that even more actually

anyway.. i got some good progress with n0nx0x and ideas about Track-Record and Pattern-Record mode
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D05LdQGCk0A

[Eleventh]

i haven't promised anything, it's what it is, it's not your only option you know ;]

Yes I know... after trying your plugin I just had to dig up my Ultra Analog again and make some 303ish patches. Maybe not the most authentic but to my ears sounds nice!

Anyway I hope that you'll continue to develop the plugin on all fronts. There are never enough 303 emulations, especially free ones! =)

Cheers!

[Tuth]

Can't be bothered to read the whole 25 page thread so apologies if I'm repeating what others have said here.

sharke: I chk everyday this place, like the beta forum icheckd near everyday from the first beta versions.... to the 1.0 release. Waiting 4 years for the 1.0 ver. . The one of the most importat thing: how can antto get a Roland TB 303.

[overhishead]

youre doing a real favor for the antique business by forcing people to learn how to use a generally unavailable piece of gear.

and in my best werner herzog voice: "but why?"

why not let people use an instrument the way they like? my impression is this pedagogy is leaning toward the sadistic side.

i mean, today i spent all day trying to figure out why my daw is making clicks, and the little time i have left can't be spent trying to 'crack' a free plugin in order to use my piano roll with it.

do we really need to make work for ourselves in this day and age? i for one already have my plate full.

<edit>

it's like virtually hand-knitting fabric using 3d software and making it into a photoshop pattern to bucket-fill a t-shirt.

[toitoi]

youre doing a real favor for the antique business by forcing people to learn how to use a generally unavailable piece of gear.

and in my best werner herzog voice: "but why?"

why not let people use an instrument the way they like? my impression is this pedagogy is leaning toward the sadistic side.

i mean, today i spent all day trying to figure out why my daw is making clicks, and the little time i have left can't be spent trying to 'crack' a free plugin in order to use my piano roll with it.

do we really need to make work for ourselves in this day and age? i for one already have my plate full.

<edit>

it's like virtually hand-knitting fabric using 3d software and making it into a photoshop pattern to bucket-fill a t-shirt.

[antto]

youre doing a real favor for the antique business by forcing people to learn how to use a generally unavailable piece of gear.

more and more i'm starting to regret i released it
seems there are like 5 or 10 people on this planet who actually understand why i did it this way
and for those people - it was worth it
but they get burried in negative comments quite easily

it's okay to say what you wanna say of course

you are not forced to use this plugin, it's not the only 303 plugin, there are a number of software and hardware variants

[marvotron]

seems there are like 5 or 10 people on this planet who actually understand why i did it this way

probably more than 5 or 10 of us. maybe 20?

and for those people - it was worth it

absolutely.

I never owned a 303 (borrowed one once for a few days) so have no particular attachment to the original sequencer, but I like being challenged to think in a different way.

and in the case where I had a 303 kind of pattern already in the piano roll I just copied it into Venom. didn't take long.

[Davias]

youre doing a real favor for the antique business by forcing people to learn how to use a generally unavailable piece of gear.

more and more i'm starting to regret i released it
seems there are like 5 or 10 people on this planet who actually understand why i did it this way
and for those people - it was worth it
but they get burried in negative comments quite easily

it's okay to say what you wanna say of course

you are not forced to use this plugin, it's not the only 303 plugin, there are a number of software and hardware variants

I understand why you made it this way. But I understand also I could never dig into this archaic way of making patterns again, I did it for many years and I just don't like it ^^ I guess it is all a matter of taste.

Actually I was thinking VB-303 was limited in its octave range, but reading your upper post I understand it is not the case, and I'm really glad of it. Because I love 303, but I want to push it further, to make some things never done before with it. Like putting 15 303 playing together, and controller by stochastic midi generators or something similar. And of course plays notes within the whole range of my midi keyboard. And I want the best emu, that sound most close to the 303 sound to my ears to do that, not a cheap (coded) emulation. I never clicked with Phoscyon or ABL, lacking something to me. Only RB-338 was nice to me, till I ran accross VB-303, so felt I love with it !! But the way I want to use it make it a pain, if it is already hard to use midi with one VB, it is like hell to enable it for 15 VB, and everytime your audio engine resets

Now again, I do understand why you made it that way, and I thank you again for releasing it for us poor hobos, and for putting a (crippled) midi mode into it even u didn't like it, and u feared already the reaction of ppl complaining about midi instead of admiring the sound quality or the faithful reproduction of the sequencer ways.

By the way do you know your plugin is now part of the Beat Mag DVD for july edition even having its little place in the pages of the magazine ? I don't read german so I'm not sure what they say about it ^^

[antto]

By the way do you know your plugin is now part of the Beat Mag DVD for july edition even having its little place in the pages of the magazine ? I don't read german so I'm not sure what they say about it ^^

wtf..
that's not very nice if it's true

[Davias]

Just double checked... It is present on the DVD, in the directory "Software", filename "VenomVB303_v100.zip". Sorry for bringing this on the table, hope I didn't start something smelling trouble :S

[antto]

don't be sorry
it's just not nice of whoever is doing this to not even contact me first