Cytomic "The Drop" Resonant Filter

[Kaboom75]

If I put DIVA synth then The Drop and set the midi up right in Ableton live and have Divas filter cutoff fully open.
Is that the same thing as using Diva on it's own does The Drop filter act just like DIVAs filter as a synth filter should ? I know The Drop has more options but just wondering if I'm missing anything or making it worse than just DIVA on it's own it sounds right to me.

[andy-cytomic]

If I put DIVA synth then The Drop and set the midi up right in Ableton live and have Divas filter cutoff fully open.
Is that the same thing as using Diva on it's own does The Drop filter act just like DIVAs filter as a synth filter should ? I know The Drop has more options but just wondering if I'm missing anything or making it worse than just DIVA on it's own it sounds right to me.

The Drop has huge amounts of low aliasing resonance growl and complex drive, so you can turn even the most boring of perfectly geometric oscillators into monster sounding analog beasts. I don't know of any other filters that offer so much tone and detail.

Using Diva with The Drop after it is fine, but on Diva you can't bypass the filter section, so you may be better off using a synth where you can like Strobe, Cypher, or Bazille - anything that can produce a clean anti-aliased buzzing sound without any filtering is good. Strobe has a beefed up oscillator section similar to an SH-101, and Cypher features a triple oscillator section like a Moog Voyager (continuously variable shape between triangle, saw, pulse with audio rate modulation), and Bazille has a cool phase distortion oscillator.

The other thing to keep in mind is the amp section. Some synths add a little bit of drive in the amp section, some actually get pushed into hard clip pretty easily. Diva models the amp section of the synths, since it is a synth plugin. The Drop does not model the amp sections of any synths, it features a clean linear gain stage, which is more useful for processing full mixes and to keep the CPU consumption lower. Also the envelopes on The Drop are more basic than most synth envelopes, they AHR like on a Moog Taurus rather than full ADSR like on most synths. An AHR is more useful for envelope following for an effect.

[NNevez]

The lack of one full ADSR envelope is the only thing that i feel is missing in The Drop.

Everything else is amazing but the lack of one ADSR is the only thing that i would change, the other one could very well be an envelope follower like it is now.

[andy-cytomic]

The lack of one full ADSR envelope is the only thing that i feel is missing in The Drop.

Everything else is amazing but the lack of one ADSR is the only thing that i would change, the other one could very well be an envelope follower like it is now.

Do you want an ADSR envelope for processing anything but oscillator inputs from synths?

[Kaboom75]

Thanks guys I'll use both filters then. ADSR would be a great feature for the drop.

[NNevez]

What i mean is if one creates a lead sound (or other sound) in a synth one can use the filter envelope of the synth to make the sound very snappy. When using The Drop (it sounds so good that i want to use it on almost everything ) it does not seem possible to have that snappiness because of the lack of ADSR.

An ADSR would permit full control of the filter envelope, would open a lot more possibilities and that would be even more gold!

[camsr]

You don't need an ADSR directly with the external sidechain. Any signal can control the filter.
A small example I might use is the IL Sytrus synth, I setup a DC signal in it, then use the multipoint envelope on the DC signal, route it into The Drop, bam ADSR. Maybe there is some free plugins that can generate an envelope directly, something specific to an ADSR.

[andy-cytomic]

What i mean is if one creates a lead sound (or other sound) in a synth one can use the filter envelope of the synth to make the sound very snappy. When using The Drop (it sounds so good that i want to use it on almost everything ) it does not seem possible to have that snappiness because of the lack of ADSR.

An ADSR would permit full control of the filter envelope, would open a lot more possibilities and that would be even more gold!

I won't be adding an ADSR to The Drop since it designed primarily as an effect plugin, it has NOT been designed as a synth without oscillators, although you can use it to process oscillator signals. I will be doing a synth in the future, so this new synth product will probably be what you want more so than The Drop. It is essential to keep the workflow of The Drop focussed to allow processing of both amplitude and filter cutoff via envelope followers, much like the Mutronics Mutator http://www.mutronics.co.uk/html/mutator.htm or the Chippmann Ebbe und Flut http://www.schippmann-music.com/ebbeundflut.html .

If you really want you can use both envelope followers together to create a single MIDI triggered ADSR shape, just do the following:

1) set both envelopes to MIDI as the source
2) set one to TRIG mode and one to GATE mode
3) set the Attack time to the same on both, H to zero on both
4) the TRIG mode R gives you your regular ADSR D
5) the GATE mode full level gives you your ADSR S
6) the GAte mode R gives you your regular ADSR R

You can use the sensitivity to get a dynamic AD spike level, and also a dynamic S level, but if you don't want that set the sensitivity to 100% and use the depth controls to set the fixed depth AD spike and ASR envelopes contribute to the overall ADSR shape. If you want ADSR for both filter and amp then just run two instances of The Drop and switch off the filters on one of them and use this two env trick.

Also as suggested you can use an external plugin to generate ADSR shapes and modulate things in The Drop using the audio rate FM input via the sidechain (IN SC).

[NNevez]

Cool.
Thanks for the tips!
It´s not that i want to use it like a synth without oscillators exclusively, it´s more that i ALSO want to use it like that.
Looking at those possibilities, i see now that no adsr is needed.
An external envelope through sidechain was something that i clearly overlooked.

[andy-cytomic]

Cool.
Thanks for the tips!
It´s not that i want to use it like a synth without oscillators exclusively, it´s more that i ALSO want to use it like that.
Looking at those possibilities, i see now that no adsr is needed.
An external envelope through sidechain was something that i clearly overlooked.

Please check out the expert sleepers "silent way" plugin suite as they have all sorts of modules that generate DC audio signals you can use via the IN SC input to the FM section, so you can add any number of new envelopes and LFOs and step sequencers and more.

[btw]

Cool.
Thanks for the tips!
It´s not that i want to use it like a synth without oscillators exclusively, it´s more that i ALSO want to use it like that.
Looking at those possibilities, i see now that no adsr is needed.
An external envelope through sidechain was something that i clearly overlooked.

Please check out the expert sleepers "silent way" plugin suite as they have all sorts of modules that generate DC audio signals you can use via the IN SC input to the FM section, so you can add any number of new envelopes and LFOs and step sequencers and more.

Nice, those look pretty great.

You already mentioned Bazille for its oscillators, and I just thought I'd add that given its modular routing, it should be equally good for generating flexible control signals.

[VariKusBrainZ]

Cool.
Thanks for the tips!
It´s not that i want to use it like a synth without oscillators exclusively, it´s more that i ALSO want to use it like that.
Looking at those possibilities, i see now that no adsr is needed.
An external envelope through sidechain was something that i clearly overlooked.

Please check out the expert sleepers "silent way" plugin suite as they have all sorts of modules that generate DC audio signals you can use via the IN SC input to the FM section, so you can add any number of new envelopes and LFOs and step sequencers and more.

And if you have max4live there are quite a few free equivelant to Silent Way

[andy-cytomic]

Cool.
Thanks for the tips!
It´s not that i want to use it like a synth without oscillators exclusively, it´s more that i ALSO want to use it like that.
Looking at those possibilities, i see now that no adsr is needed.
An external envelope through sidechain was something that i clearly overlooked.

Please check out the expert sleepers "silent way" plugin suite as they have all sorts of modules that generate DC audio signals you can use via the IN SC input to the FM section, so you can add any number of new envelopes and LFOs and step sequencers and more.

Nice, those look pretty great.

You already mentioned Bazille for its oscillators, and I just thought I'd add that given its modular routing, it should be equally good for generating flexible control signals.

Bazille blocks dc signals at its output, so unless you can find an option to disable this you cannot use the envelopes on Bazille as a source for the FM of The Drop. The only reason I mentioned Bazille is that the person was using Diva so obviously likes U-He products, so I was suggesting a U-He product that you could bypass the filters, which I know you can do in Bazille.

PS: I've emailed Urs to see if he can add some kind of "no dc block" checkbox to each output on Bazille

[billcarroll]

Cool.
Thanks for the tips!
It´s not that i want to use it like a synth without oscillators exclusively, it´s more that i ALSO want to use it like that.
Looking at those possibilities, i see now that no adsr is needed.
An external envelope through sidechain was something that i clearly overlooked.

Please check out the expert sleepers "silent way" plugin suite as they have all sorts of modules that generate DC audio signals you can use via the IN SC input to the FM section, so you can add any number of new envelopes and LFOs and step sequencers and more.

Nice, those look pretty great.

You already mentioned Bazille for its oscillators, and I just thought I'd add that given its modular routing, it should be equally good for generating flexible control signals.

Bazille blocks dc signals at its output, so unless you can find an option to disable this you cannot use the envelopes on Bazille as a source for the FM of The Drop. The only reason I mentioned Bazille is that the person was using Diva so obviously likes U-He products, so I was suggesting a U-He product that you could bypass the filters, which I know you can do in Bazille.

Good god, Andy. How much do you actually know?! I should have done my homework. As in, any of my homework.

[btw]

Bazille blocks dc signals at its output, so unless you can find an option to disable this you cannot use the envelopes on Bazille as a source for the FM of The Drop. The only reason I mentioned Bazille is that the person was using Diva so obviously likes U-He products, so I was suggesting a U-He product that you could bypass the filters, which I know you can do in Bazille.

PS: I've emailed Urs to see if he can add some kind of "no dc block" checkbox to each output on Bazille

Yeah, discovered this myself when I went to try it--I wasn't counting on that! Of course it makes perfect sense for a self-contained synth plugin to dc-balance its output, but that would be cool if Urs added a "no dc block" option to extend the range of Bazille's applications. Oh well. The Drop's internal modulation already covers pretty much anything I'd want to do in practice.