u-he

Igor Amos · Post by **Igor Amos** » Thu Jul 31, 2014 4:08 pm

thank you!

u-he-michael · Post by **u-he-michael** » Thu Jul 31, 2014 6:52 pm

Regarding the latest Public Beta and available version of Bazille, please go here:

Bazille 0.9.3 rev2566 > Extended Beta-period until end of August 2014
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 1&t=417200

ishkabbible · Post by **ishkabbible** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 3:08 am

OK, you've sold me. This synth can make some wonderful sounds.

I only have one complaint, and I have to assume that I just haven't flipped some switch right. The assignment of polyphonic notes seems, just, wrong somehow, but I can't quite put my finger on how. I use about a dozen other synths, and none of them do the note assignments like this. The problem is most noticeable when just jamming - if I hold one or two bass notes, I expect to be able to use the rest of the polyphonic sections to play a melody, but that is not what happens. For some reason the melody "steals" the bass notes! The same happens if I try to hold a chord with my right while playing a walking bass with the left - the walking bass ends up stealing the notes from my chord, even though I clearly have commanded those notes to stay playing by the lack of a NOTE_OFF.
Perhaps what I am seeing is that the Bazille scheduler doesn't distinguish between notes that have received a NOTE_OFF and are still going through the "release" part of the envelopes (fair game for assigning a new note), and notes that are still in the "sustain" section (untouchable).
This is, IMHO, a deal breaker for this being a true polyphonic synth - makes it only "polyphonic" in the sense that the decay of one note can overlap the attack of the next.

Am I doing something wrong? Or is this really how this was designed to work?
I am running the 64 bit public beta Rev. 2370 in Reaper x64 on a quad core i7.

Edit: OOoohhh - I just noticed a new version is out. Will download and see if this is fixed

ho66it · Post by **ho66it** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 3:38 am

ishkabbible wrote:OK, you've sold me. This synth can make some wonderful sounds.

I only have one complaint, and I have to assume that I just haven't flipped some switch right. The assignment of polyphonic notes seems, just, wrong somehow, but I can't quite put my finger on how. I use about a dozen other synths, and none of them do the note assignments like this. The problem is most noticeable when just jamming - if I hold one or two bass notes, I expect to be able to use the rest of the polyphonic sections to play a melody, but that is not what happens. For some reason the melody "steals" the bass notes! The same happens if I try to hold a chord with my right while playing a walking bass with the left - the walking bass ends up stealing the notes from my chord, even though I clearly have commanded those notes to stay playing by the lack of a NOTE_OFF.
Perhaps what I am seeing is that the Bazille scheduler doesn't distinguish between notes that have received a NOTE_OFF and are still going through the "release" part of the envelopes (fair game for assigning a new note), and notes that are still in the "sustain" section (untouchable).
This is, IMHO, a deal breaker for this being a true polyphonic synth - makes it only "polyphonic" in the sense that the decay of one note can overlap the attack of the next.

Am I doing something wrong? Or is this really how this was designed to work?
I am running the 64 bit public beta Rev. 2370 in Reaper x64 on a quad core i7.

Edit: OOoohhh - I just noticed a new version is out. Will download and see if this is fixed

This is probably a dumb question for you but…did you check the number of voices & number of stacked voices? This will determine how soon voices get reallocated. I noticed the held notes getting stolen too, and I fixed it (well enough at least) by adjusting these two settings to add more voices and reduce the stacked voices - up to the point that my CPU chokes anyway!

ishkabbible · Post by **ishkabbible** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 3:48 am

Hi Ho66it.
I did play around with those settings, until I, too, choked a quad core i7-3770 @ 3.4GHz, but that only delays the problem, doesn't solve it.
Which brings up another "issue". I have NEVER managed to choke this system with a single track before. Sounds like Bazille is quite the CPU hog, using Bazille-ions of CPU cycles

justin3am · Post by **justin3am** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 4:06 am

Yep, Bazille can use a lot of CPU horse power. If you haven't already, try turning on the 'Multicore' feature to distribute the voices across multiple cores.

Bazille's maximum amount of voices is 16. If you are playing a patch with 4 stacked voices, when you play more than four notes, voice stealing will occur. You can change the voice priority so the lowest or highest active notes get stolen but other than that, you will probably encounter voice stealing when you play a lot of notes (particularly if the sound has a long release stage).

Gone soft · Post by **Gone soft** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 4:23 am

justin3am wrote:You can change the voice priority so the lowest or highest active notes get stolen but other than that, you will probably encounter voice stealing when you play a lot of notes (particularly if the sound has a long release stage).

How? According to the user manual (page 36 about the "Voice" settings) the "Priority" parameter with its last/lowest/highest setting only applies to Mono and Legato modes. Do you mean choosing between "poly" and "poly2"? The regular "poly" mode isn't described as anything but "polyphonic" but this is what the manual says about "poly2":

poly2 ..........like Poly, but voices in their release stages are stolen before new ones

Which may mean the regular "poly" mode should work better for ishkabbible, though I imagine it's likely Bazille was set to the regular "poly" mode by default so perhaps not...

ishkabbible · Post by **ishkabbible** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 4:26 am

It just seems to me that ALL notes that have already been NOTE_OFFed should get stolen before stealing any that are still being held. I would think that lowest or highest stealing should be subordinate to my explicit command to "hold that note".
I mean, I could probably get used to it, it just means that I have to be very careful when designing the MIDI sequences, and I can't ever play it like a real polyphonic synth (basically use only for leads). But $130 is a VERY premium price for a VST - I would expect behavior at least as good as the freeware out there.

ishkabbible · Post by **ishkabbible** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 4:28 am

@V-GER - it sounds like poly2 is EXACTLY what I want.
<fires up Reaper...>

justin3am · Post by **justin3am** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 4:34 am

V-GER wrote:
justin3am wrote:You can change the voice priority so the lowest or highest active notes get stolen but other than that, you will probably encounter voice stealing when you play a lot of notes (particularly if the sound has a long release stage).
How? According to the user manual (page 36 about the "Voice" settings) the "Priority" parameter with its last/lowest/highest setting only applies to Mono and Legato modes. Do you mean choosing between "poly" and "poly2"? The regular "poly" mode isn't described as anything but "polyphonic" but this is what the manual says about "poly2":
poly2 ..........like Poly, but voices in their release stages are stolen before new ones
Which may mean the regular "poly" mode should work better for ishkabbible, though I imagine it's likely Bazille was set to the regular "poly" mode by default so perhaps not...

You're right, I'm dumb.

I've never actually played enough notes to notice the voice stealing kick in.

ishkabbible · Post by **ishkabbible** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 5:03 am

I don't have this "poly2" setting. My Mode menu ends at "duo". I feel very picked upon now

However, Rev 2566 is a lot less bad about this stealing than 2370 was.
There is still a bug in the key assignment, though. With poly=8 and stack=1, when I play 5 note chords I often (20% of the time, maybe) only get 3 or 4 notes. Bazille seems to have some difficulty when 2 notes happen at exactly the same time.

Gone soft · Post by **Gone soft** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 5:26 am

justin3am wrote:I've never actually played enough notes to notice the voice stealing kick in.

To be honest neither have I, I just took the opportunity to educate myself on how to deal with it should such an unlikely scenario occur.

And try to help someone while at it, offcourse.

ishkabbible wrote:I don't have this "poly2" setting. My Mode menu ends at "duo". I feel very picked upon now
However, Rev 2566 is a lot less bad about this stealing than 2370 was.
There is still a bug in the key assignment, though. With poly=8 and stack=1, when I play 5 note chords I often (20% of the time, maybe) only get 3 or 4 notes. Bazille seems to have some difficulty when 2 notes happen at exactly the same time.

Ah, I loaded the latest Bazille beta in Reaper to check if it's the same on my system and indeed "poly2" is gone. Same thing in FL Studio 11 too, so it's not Reaper specific. I made sure I checked the latest version of the usermanual, but I didn't think to double check if the latest beta had removed anything - sorry about that... But it seems at least it works better for you now anyway, thats good, right?

Perhaps "poly2" was no longer needed after they optimised some of the voodoo in there? And I've noticed there's been some debate of things misbehaving with notes that are very close to each other when it comes to other things like mapping too, guess they still have a bit of polishing to do before we get that final release...

pdxindy · Post by **pdxindy** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:17 am

ishkabbible wrote:I don't have this "poly2" setting. My Mode menu ends at "duo". I feel very picked upon now
However, Rev 2566 is a lot less bad about this stealing than 2370 was.
There is still a bug in the key assignment, though. With poly=8 and stack=1, when I play 5 note chords I often (20% of the time, maybe) only get 3 or 4 notes. Bazille seems to have some difficulty when 2 notes happen at exactly the same time.

I'm not sure what is going on for you... but I get the expected behavior. With Poly = 8 and stack 1, I can hold a 4 note chord and play up to 4 other simultaneous notes and none of the held notes are stolen. I can set release high and play a bunch of notes and the 4 held notes remain and the notes in the release stage are stolen.

ishkabbible · Post by **ishkabbible** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 7:11 am

@V-GER - You are right - they may have fixed it already, and that's a Very Good Thing. And if the reason that poly2 is gone is because it is now the default, all the better

I spent about 20 minutes playing Rev. 2566 and the only thing that it did that made me go "huh?" was the 5 note chord thing. I will record the MIDI so I can look at exact note timings and see if I can create a recipe that causes the behavior.
I also need to find the section in the manual that talks about the MIDI interface. If this is doing something like responding to multiple MIDI channels, it could be getting some confusing messages in my setup.
I really appreciate the help, folks. Windspace messaged me about Bazille just yesterday on Soundcloud, so I downloaded it, and now am being the quintessential noob while also trying to be a good beta tester

All in all, I must say that I am impressed. I think this will be an amazing synth once they get the bugs out.

pdxindy · Post by **pdxindy** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 7:35 am

ishkabbible wrote: I also need to find the section in the manual that talks about the MIDI interface. If this is doing something like responding to multiple MIDI channels, it could be getting some confusing messages in my setup.

Bazille supports note per midi channel (first u-he synth to do so)... so you can do polyphonic per note expression in hosts that support it. It was recently added.

u-he

KVR Audio

Bazille Public Beta (updated to 2370)