Sitala drum sampler going into alpha, looking for feedback!

[luzifer]

Wow! Guys, that is a lot of valuable input coming in. Thank you.
I'd like to start by asking about the installer. @devilnishy has experienced some weird interference with i-lok. Has anybody else run across that? It'd be extremely thankful for a screenshot or other pointers that would help me track the issue down.

[scotchi]

I like the idea of a simple sampler with 4 main controls that aim to be expressive. Presumably, this is not meant to replace a DAW's built-in sampling tools, because if so, it would need to be much more comprehensive (and my feedback won't make sense).

It depends quite a bit on the DAW. Some ship with quite good out of the box drum samplers, and some (e.g. Cubase) have pretty terrible built in drum samplers. So it's kind of a mixed bag of doing both a simple and expressive drum sampler, and in some cases provide a better option for electronic-ish drums in DAWs that don't provide something decent out of the box.

• The shape knob is the most interesting by far; good work on that!

Thanks! It's definitely the thing that's had the most tweaking (and still has some to come -- just before doing this build we were starting to re-jigger how quickly it shifts over to a glitchy envelop since it feels to me like too much of the knob's range is concentrated over there...)

• Volume probably shouldn't be one of the "main 4" controls, since it's not so much for expression and more for mixing. It could go at the bottom of the interface, under each drum pad.

Yeah, I think you're right on this one. We'd talked about it a bit back in the context of adding a pan control, which we also wouldn't want to take up such precious screen real-estate. The biggest thing we were struggling with was basically where to actually put those. We may do some mockups in the next week and post them here to see what people think of a couple different options.

• The pitch control also isn't the most interesting, but in combination with some modulations it could be a lot more fun.

Do you mean one knob that does pitch shifting and applies modulations? I'm trying to let my mind wander a bit on that ... it'd still need to be able to do simple things like pitch down a kick or pitch up a snare, but it's interesting to me to think what it might sound like if as you turned the knob further it put the sound through a ring modulator or somesuch.

• I think a global LFO and velocity linking would add a lot of expressive options to the plugin. Whether or not that's in scope is up to you.

We actually had that in an early version of Sitala, but then we basically redid the whole interface and it never made it back in. This does get me thinking about it again though (and specifically if there's a way to add such while keeping the interface pretty minimalist).

• The closed hi hat should probably cut the open hi hat.

Agree. Added to our list of bugs for the next alpha.

• You could put the velocity to volume link before the compressor so you get different dynamics depending on the velocity.

Agree here too. I think that should be the default in fact, so also added that to the next version's to-do.

• The ability to send each sample to a different output would be nice, but I'm not sure how hard that is to implement.

I know that some VSTs support more than stereo out (Kontakt, specifically, I think I remember having a 16 out version, but I think it requires a separate VST, rather than being something that can be configured at run-time. It's an interesting idea, but I think one we'd probably look at a little further out.

• Some lo-fi options might be cool?

We've been thinking of a "dirt" knob that sweeps through a few kinds of distortion, bit crushing, etc. My feeling is that'd probably be better deserving of the screen real-estate that the volume knob is currently occupying.

I'm really glad I'm not the only person trying to create plugins that aim for a high level of expressiveness with a small set of controls. I think that's the best way to make music tools for people. If you can push the expressiveness farther without adding a lot of cognitive load, I think the plugin will start to really shine.

Yeah, that's the hope -- that it'll make it easy to explore the sonic space. (And I really like the look of Mika too. Alas, I do music on a Mac.)

[tesselode]

@luzifer: When I tried the installer the first time, it seemed to have some conflicts with Adobe's Creative Cloud app for whatever reason. It was fine the second time I tried it, though, after a restart.

@scotchi: Sounds like you all have the right idea in terms of future development. And I really need to release a Mac version of Mika, but I don't have a Mac, so I'm not sure if I could do builds from Windows? It's something I need to look into. What's the most important plugin format on Mac?

edit: yeah I don't think I can make a Mac build with my resources. But hey, if you're feeling generous with your time, you can grab the source and help me out!

[Russell Grand]

Looks nifty!
I'll try out this afternoon.

[luzifer]

@luzifer: When I tried the installer the first time, it seemed to have some conflicts with Adobe's Creative Cloud app for whatever reason. It was fine the second time I tried it, though, after a restart.

Hm ... Could be because we are bundling the vc++/windows runtime and that somehow creates a conflict. I will look into this. I grew up with Linux and Mac so i still got a few bits to learn.

edit: yeah I don't think I can make a Mac build with my resources. But hey, if you're feeling generous with your time, you can grab the source and help me out!

I noticed you had some mac specific files in your repository. I assume in that case it was auto-generated by wdl-ol? I can give it a shot on weekend and try to compile it. But can't promise you anything as of now.

[Russell Grand]

I like the idea of a simple sampler with 4 main controls that aim to be expressive. Presumably, this is not meant to replace a DAW's built-in sampling tools, because if so, it would need to be much more comprehensive (and my feedback won't make sense). But if you are in fact aiming to make 4 big knobs that are as interesting as possible, I have some unorganized thoughts:

• The shape knob is the most interesting by far; good work on that!
• Volume probably shouldn't be one of the "main 4" controls, since it's not so much for expression and more for mixing. It could go at the bottom of the interface, under each drum pad.
• The pitch control also isn't the most interesting, but in combination with some modulations it could be a lot more fun. Speaking of which:
• I think a global LFO and velocity linking would add a lot of expressive options to the plugin. Whether or not that's in scope is up to you.
• The closed hi hat should probably cut the open hi hat.
• You could put the velocity to volume link before the compressor so you get different dynamics depending on the velocity.
• The ability to send each sample to a different output would be nice, but I'm not sure how hard that is to implement.
• Some lo-fi options might be cool?

There's some good suggestions here, tesselode

[Russell Grand]

Extra idea : you could introduce some analog drift/behavior.
Again a (functional) simple way to introduce some more variance and colors.

You could apply the drift by default, provide a setting in the menu, or put a control on the GUI (but the GUI is so nice and clean now).

+1

[luzifer]

Extra idea : you could introduce some analog drift/behavior.
Again a (functional) simple way to introduce some more variance and colors.

You could apply the drift by default, provide a setting in the menu, or put a control on the GUI (but the GUI is so nice and clean now).

As @scotchi mentioned above we have been thinking about adding a 'Dirt' knob. I could imagine a knob that is by default on zero and goes to analog on one side (i.e introduce drift as you proposed and adds more waveshaping as you continue) and goes to digital on the other side to add bit crushing, clipping, and downsampling. Any thoughts?

[Stefken]

Extra idea : you could introduce some analog drift/behavior.
Again a (functional) simple way to introduce some more variance and colors.

You could apply the drift by default, provide a setting in the menu, or put a control on the GUI (but the GUI is so nice and clean now).

As @scotchi mentioned above we have been thinking about adding a 'Dirt' knob. I could imagine a knob that is by default on zero and goes to analog on one side (i.e introduce drift as you proposed and adds more waveshaping as you continue) and goes to digital on the other side to add bit crushing, clipping, and downsampling. Any thoughts?

It's not a bad idea, but I don't (fully) associate analog drift with the concept dirt.
Analog can also mean 'electric current sounds' besides drift.
Hard to explain what i mean with electric current sounds but if you open up the gain on MPReq you get that sound
http://analogobsession.com/product/mpreq/
That 's already more in the dirt section.

I associate dirt aspecially with distortion.

The main aspect of analog to me, is the fact that each hit sounds (slightly) different as opposed to the machine gun effect.

[tesselode]

edit: yeah I don't think I can make a Mac build with my resources. But hey, if you're feeling generous with your time, you can grab the source and help me out!

I noticed you had some mac specific files in your repository. I assume in that case it was auto-generated by wdl-ol? I can give it a shot on weekend and try to compile it. But can't promise you anything as of now.

Yup, it's straight from the wdl-ol default project on the master branch. I haven't changed anything significant in the Visual Studio projects besides adding files, so hopefully the XCode projects will be easy to set up correctly.

[scotchi]

Will there be an AU version?

Yep, since there seems to be significant interest in such, we'll go ahead and build an AU plugin. (The framework we're using makes it pretty easy to do.) We'll get that rolled in with the next alpha.

[onerob]

Cool, thanks.

[scotchi]

yeah I don't think I can make a Mac build with my resources. But hey, if you're feeling generous with your time, you can grab the source and help me out!

I did futz around with this a bit today -- I got the VST2 and Standalone building, but not working. The standalone doesn't seem to produce audio, and the VST crashes Live when scanning VSTs. It's probably not rocket surgery to figure out those last couple bits, so I may mess with it again in the next few days.

MikaMicro 2018-05-11 07-32-25.png

The source is also on Github: https://github.com/scotchi/mika-micro

[tesselode]

hey, that's progress! you might want to take a look at this tutorial if you haven't already, but idk if it'll actually be helpful or not

[Kenmac]

It seems like it's a pretty good drum plugin even at the early stages, however, I often use a Korg PadKontrol for drum sounds and I noticed that the mapping for the drums follows the keyboard mapping instead of the general midi drum map. Would it be possible to give the option of GM MIDI drum mapping along with those who prefer the keyboard mapping? BTW here's a link to a gif of the GM MIDI drum map:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... rumMap.gif Thanks, and looking forward to future updates.