Hive: how to control the buzz sound?

[aaron aardvark]

Let me say a few things before people start throwing tomatoes at me:

#1: With a name like Hive, it's no surprise that many of the patches have BUZZ.

#2: I liked Hive enough to buy it.

#3: I'm no Howard Scarr when it comes to making patches from scratch, but I think I'm decent at tweaking existing patches.

#4: My ears are sensitive to certain high frequency sounds, I've been known to hear "ultrasonic" sounds not heard by the vast majority of humans on this planet, but I don't want to stuff cotton in my ears.

That being said, some of the Hive factory patches that have BUZZ I like, and many of those that have BUZZ I don't like, and I typically can't figure out how to tame it enough. I've tried experimenting with Normal, Dirty, and Clean with limited success. Sometimes lowering the filter cutoff makes the sound virtually disappear. Lowering the high EQ helps some, but not as much as I would have expected. I've turned off or lowered distortion. This synth appears a lot less complex than Zebra, so it can't be that difficult. Many of the non-buzzy patches I like. Perhaps some of you better tone tweakers have some advice for me.

[Shiek927]

You may be hearing the sound of the filters.

Hive sounds very much like Bazille. It has a very mechanical and electrical sort of tone to it. I used to view this negatively until I realized this is the sound of hardware. Hardware synths all share this quality.

[aaron aardvark]

Sheik927 & others,
Thank you for replying. For me, Bazille has less buzzy sound in general. Any other replies from anyone else are welcome.

[Dasheesh]

You are talking about an intended super saw synth with single cycle samples as oscillators for laughing out loud. They used to say the same thing about waldorf, and guess what, I love waldorf.

[aaron aardvark]

Dasheesh,
There are people that obviously like most or all of the buzzy sounds; I have nothing against people liking those sounds. Pleasing synth sounds are purely subjective. If I remember correctly, Diva (I own it) is capable of emulating the super saw now. It is capable of being a bit buzzy, but generally less buzzy than Hive in my opinion. Thank you for replying.

[llze]

maybe post a preset so we could figure it out better

[zvenx]

maybe post a preset so we could figure it out better

Do you have the required ultrasonic ears?

#4: My ears are sensitive to certain high frequency sounds, I've been known to hear "ultrasonic" sounds not heard by the vast majority of humans on this planet, but I don't want to stuff cotton in my ears.

[aaron aardvark]

Hopefully ultrasonic ears are not required. I'm not sure I can hear ultrasonic things anymore anyway (like ultrasonic alarms). OK, for example, take the Xenos (no offense to Xenos please!) patch "Big Unison Lead 09". Very often I like unison synths modeled after synths made long ago (some being resurrected from the dead as of lately in some form). I can see why someone would like this patch (sounds like a 1,000 angry bees or wasps), but it just has too much buzz in it for my taste. But somehow, it seems like it should have potential to sound fully good to me with adjustment. There is an element to it I like. I tried the things I already mentioned, and I can't get it to sound fully good to my dog ears (maybe I'm beyond hope). I could list more patches in the future, but I might be stirring up a hornet's nest.

[core]

What happens when you turn down the volume of the Sub oscs in that patch, better?

[Kriminal]

You are talking about an intended super saw synth with single cycle samples as oscillators for laughing out loud.

Really? Thats a new one on me....

[Howard]

...it just has too much buzz in it for my taste.

Try disabling the EQ.

[aaron aardvark]

I haven't fully explored this, but I just had to respond:

core,
I didn't think you could possibly be correct, but I tried it out. In my brain, when I see Sub, I think sub-bass, and just assumed that Sub would always be low frequency, and I associate the buzz sound with high frequency. In the case of the "Big Unison Lead 09" patch, the SUB1 is turned up by 24 semitones, which I must assume is 2 octaves up. I can't say lowering the volume or pitch of SUB1 makes it sound necessarily better, but it did take away some of the buzz element. Definitely learned something I did not anticipate. Thank you!

Howard,
Thank you for chiming in! I admire your abilities. Once again, disabling the EQ gave a response that was very different from what I anticipated. What surprised me is that when you disable the EQ, even when the Bass, Mid, and High are all turned down as far as they will go (or other combinations), the sound is less bright. I would have thought turning on the EQ with the high frequencies turned all the way down would make it sound less bright, but just the opposite happens. Perhaps just turning on the EQ turns up the volume, and is giving a false impression? The other thing that surprised me is this: with EQ on, and High frequencies turned all the way down, turning the Mid down makes it sound more bright. Not intuitive for me. The other weird thing is having the High and Mid all the way up, I could hardly hear the difference while adjusting the Bass (on good headphones). I didn't noticed earlier that you can move the EQ around on the signal chain, amazing what reading the instruction manual again does.

[chk071]

#4: My ears are sensitive to certain high frequency sounds, I've been known to hear "ultrasonic" sounds not heard by the vast majority of humans on this planet, but I don't want to stuff cotton in my ears.

Hm, did you ever do an x-ray or something? Because basically, the physical structure of the human drumhead isn't made for that type of thing. Which means that you are not supposed to hear ultrasonic frequencies. So unless your drumhead is similar to that of a dog, it's virtually impossible to hear those frequencies. Just saying.

[cron]

I don't own Hive, but I'm wondering if the 'buzz' you're hearing is the kind of 'scratchy' sound you get when individual saws (or any oscillator with large discontinuities in the waveform) are playing in phase with each other. When playing low, you can almost hear the individual pulses of each oscillation.

I'm looking at the GUI on a Youtube vid and I see there's a phase control in the bottom left of each oscillator panel. Have you tried setting that to random? I'm wondering if the patches you don't like have phase set to 'reset' or somesuch.

[aaron aardvark]

#4: My ears are sensitive to certain high frequency sounds, I've been known to hear "ultrasonic" sounds not heard by the vast majority of humans on this planet, but I don't want to stuff cotton in my ears.

Hm, did you ever do an x-ray or something? Because basically, the physical structure of the human drumhead isn't made for that type of thing. Which means that you are not supposed to hear ultrasonic frequencies. So unless your drumhead is similar to that of a dog, it's virtually impossible to hear those frequencies. Just saying.

This happened over 25 years ago: there was a photo lab in town, and every time I went in there, I heard a very high pitch sound that was very unpleasant to me. I didn't want to stay there long. I brought that up to an employee there and he said only one other person had complained about it in many years. He said it was the ultrasonic alarm. Seemingly, no one else could hear it. I haven't experienced anything like that in a long time, but very often I turn down the high EQ or distortion on other people's synth & guitar effect patches. When someone blows a dog whistle, I hear some sort of high frequencies, but probably different than what a dog hears. Not sure if it sounds the same to your average "normal" person.