in an effort to staunch the flagging sales resultant from the blossoming of an exploitive and corrupt economic culture so i can lay in a few more rounds of ammo and barrels of molasses, i thought i'd recap my vst activity for 2011:

but before that, i'll lure you with purchase opportunities to come - syng3!

i've been working on syng3 for about a month now. many things are still up in the air, i'm still between the basic engine and refining data at present.

i can report that it uses about 10% of my 1.6g cpu, which is more or less what ambience vst uses. the emphasis for this release is upping voice quality, approximating the spectral contour of formants down to -90dB, which means that the voice has character information.

usage is similar to syng2 and expanded in sensible ways, eg. with a vocal power parameter to fade between soft and strong performance. as of yet the amount of character modification i can add is not determined. as usual, i think it sounds cool and i at least will get plenty of use out of it.


as promised, here is a review of my vst for the last year in case you're checking in.

11-11-23 Ess3 Formant Synth
an oscillator i was developing for syng3. i decided that it was too cpu intensive, but wrapped it for posterity. this vst doesn't do much, but might avail some interesting "vocal" synth sounds:

11-11-21 Spring2
someone prompted me to investigate spring reverbs because of my physical modeling experience. ultimately this model uses no emulation of mechanical coupling and stacks lots of allpass filters to emulate the signal "most of the way". i'm quite happy with the end result, though it's been ignored by people who like to celebrate vst for guitars..


11-10-17 Modal
a 1 and 2 dimensional percussion spectral modeler similar to radian, does flat plate and stretched partial linear resonator sounds (eg. thick bass strings) similar to AAS and NI plugins that have been released this year.

11-09-14 Pink
my latest guitar amp model.. i doubt that limiting the parameter set more would have been received better by the cloistered guitar vst community who enthusiastically disappeared it. i basically gunked a bunch of amp emu dsp i've stacked up over the years into one vst because i didn't like the selection of cpu intensive free amp emus.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNYcviXK4rg
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

11-09-05 Standard
4th in my "oscillator algorithm demonstration vst" series that began with W last december. these vst were intended to be explicit about the kind of oscillator they use so that when you want a particular kind of sound, these mysterious dsp techniques people use would make more sense in application.. standard is the BLIT (bandlimited impulse train) edition, i use it a lot for elementary analog sounds.

11-08-23 Aurora
the other BLIT (bandlimited interpolated tables) oscillator synth.. fulfilling my long-standing ambition to upset social expectations by releasing an unseemly pink gui. one of my go-to synths.

11-07-23 Swish2
6 part filtered stereo noise synth for the 'swish' effects i use in my "joy electric" styled music. due to resonant filters, this has become fairly popular for analog percussion (note the 333 free presets recently made by an anonymous donor..)

11-07-19 Star Cym
only got a bit of use out of this - a dispersive multiport junction feedback delay network conceived in development of 'elder thing' - makes cymbally sounds, uses a lot of cpu.

11-07-14 Radian
yay! if you haven't checked out radian, do so. a percussion plugin that actually sounds like a circular membrane. 38 people own a radian license, and that's how this business is run, folks.

11-05-24 Naive Lead
the 2nd "oscillator algorithm" vst. i've gotten a lot of positive feedback on this, perhaps because it exemplifies the goal of this series best, or because of the donated presets. i use the others more, but this has more to do with their features (which are fairly elementary in all of them) than the sound. perhaps people like the panning scheme.

11-04-25
Elder Thing
something i had to do, glad i did it, never use it, not a fan of the horror genre.

11-02-12 Amboea
i haven't used this much, but will one of these days. a flexible algorithmic multi delay for ambient music. of course like many delays i could probably make a couple of albums based on this vst. glad someone asked me to make it, i would never have thought about doing it myself.


so for 2011 i didn't achieve my postulated goal of moving to the steinberg vst sdk. it's still a possibility, but less interesting to me than making the diversity of things i can focus on without having to do extra muck for the gui, so it is less of a priority than it was a year ago. i did achieve my other goal of learning a bit more about dsp. i can use fft now and do a few basic things with it. i haven't tried lpc (linear predictive coding) yet which would be useful for what i do.. in order to be on par with other developers i should have experience with this, minbleps and phase vocoding, but there's still a lot of other things to do, eg. making a nice voice synthesizer... these things interest me. minbleps don't especially.

a lot going on in the world. mixed feelings about saying that i expect this next year will continue to create a deeper appreciation and awareness in many of you for the issues i have used my vst career to platform, and i mean that most sincerely. i don't talk about it much for two reasons - it's been made clear to me that i'd get banned from kvr and because i don't think i need to as much anymore, do i.

all the best,
rurik

thanks for the great work,always exciting and pushing sound barriers.
all the best for 2012.

Thx mate. Keep up the great work

thanks for some great fx and synths
looking forward for 2012 !

Rurik, I always get a buzz from the sheer inventiveness of your work. I am in this game mainly for the fun at the fringe - you make it, I'll buy it. I still love to have a coupla bourbons and play with Elder Thing, and I never get sick of Radian or Modal. Syng3 - bring it on. The last half of this year has been really interesting. Keep up the new stuff, your audience may be small, but we are enthusiastic!

Best regards,
Keith Arnold
blakkshepeaudio

You certainly do an interesting and varied set of plugins, you are the plugin designer equivalent of the guy who builds crazy contraptions in his garden shed, I mean that as a compliment.

i see them as sonic luxury,like haute couture,with Primark prices!

targét

my ego was sullied to see the word "boutique" in ref. to this industry ridiculed earlier this year without being recognised for my long-standing application of the term still a far cry from that fellow selling vst for 2p.

i will try not to abuse that privilege rathead

what can i say, fun to do, and glad to be appreciated for it.

Dear Rurik,

Thank you very much for filling 2011 with a lot of sonic creativeness. I appreciate your work very much. I also appreciate your generous and creative spirit. I wish you all the best in 2012.

you are welcome this year didn't see a lot of free releases from me. some had light demo limitations, i tried to compromise by keeping prices in line with the economy. thank you, i expect 2012 will be entertaining.

Thanks indeed!

i'm going to add my whinge too, because i feel it's important for envaluating my availability at my "official support forum".

i was banned from kvr twice in 2011 totalling over a month in duration, for eg. quoting a veteran's opinion about corruption in the military which didn't directly mention the seal team 6 incident i had been previously told i would be banned if i mentioned. it's obvious that i am not welcome to share my perspective here without being marginalised. similarly, i was dragged into controversy repeatedly by whyterabbyt when he has previously expressed (in one of the elder thing threads) that he knew he was not welcome to be my customer. be aware that i will delete any comments on this from this forum. no one is going to have their opinion changed by further discussion of the topic.

also in mid-2011, my threads in the instruments forum started to receive a lot of attention. my pre-release for radian received well over 10,000 hits. peopel were posting positive comments, the number of views kept going up and up.

then i posted a new thread on another product. within half an hour, the thread had over 2000 hits. i mean.. i'm good, but there aren't 2000 users at kvr in that amount of time.

so i mentioned it in the site stuff forum and the thread hit counts returned to normal.. a few hundred a week. but there was no acknowledgement that my threads were being artificially inflated. to me, it is yet another instance where i have received "special attention" on kvr that goes unnoticed, so if i speak out about it it makes me look bad.

to this point, i have yet to sell 40 copies of radian, despite being bundled with 3 other vsts, and despite the unique (and in my opinion, long awaited) capability of this instrument.

because of this, i don't enjoy this forum. seeing the depth of deviousness of commercial and other interests in this marketplace isn't an enjoyable thing, and i am forced to wonder what artificial perceptions i am subjected to, if new people even see my vst notices. most people decide to be silent instead of raise their voice when issues do become visible, because those who do speak out are silenced. so we have a monoculture here. given the diminishing number of economically potentiated customers i doubt the diversity of the vst market will persist.

when i was banned i spent a good deal of time on the phone and in email correspondence with receptor inc. and never received any kind of reply from whatshisface who manages kvr now, so my business, welfare and fair treatment doesn't seem to be his concern.

so for now, i enjoy interacting with those of you who are agenda free, but the off topic forum here was taken over years ago and that vector continues to encroach upon the venue of market interactions, so i don't hang around here any longer than i need to.

you know what i mean?

Xo, I have been a member here for a long time, although I have just recently become active. I have to tell you, I was unaware of any of the travails you posted about. The only thing I really know about you is that you make kick-ass plugins. I have loved the things you did for the various plugin contests.

My plugin budget is very limited at the moment, but when funds free up, I will be seriously looking at some of yours. I am putting a list together of things I want, and your stuff is on it.

I have never been on the off-topic threads. If I want to argue, I will go somewhere else. I come here for music and technology, and in that respect this place has been great.

For some reason, people on online forums forget that real people are on the receiving end of their posts. As such, they behave in ways they never would if they were looking you in the face. I wish it weren't true, but unfortunately it is. One person went so far as to look me up on the Internet, call my house, and threaten me just for posting opinions that didn't agree with his. Well, technically I was posting facts that contradicted his opinions, but that's another thing.

So I say, stick with music. I have yet to see people come to blows over which channel strip to use.

thanks. by talking about this it does make me look like i'm whinging, but by doing so, people are more likely to notice what they may otherwise discard as inconsequential.

in 2005 i started posting on kvr and elsewhere about people who were harassing me in real life. i've caught a lot of flack (gonig on seven years of flack) for it. if you're subjected to abuse you have to find your own way to balance it with moving forward whether it's one call or a campaign. but yes, people occasionally get retarded :/

i'm glad people like my plugins, because if i had nothing to offer apart from reports of harassment, i wouldn't get heard very much

afa purchasing goes....... i sell 4 plugins for $20... or $10.... so my motive isn't limited to pecuniary recompensation. if someone can afford to pay, great, but i think right now people have other priorities, so don't sweat it

still chugging along.. will say end of feb for syng3. not in a rush.

dabbling about and found the most traditional methods are giving the best results, so thought i'd announce the use of my proprietary B.O.M.B. technology in this plugin. bloody obvious methods, blimey.

atm i'm only planning on one vocal model, but the architecture to include more is in place. i'll ask you - please keep your ears open for any youtube videos or similar for people with pleasant voices without background noise. doesn't have to be acapellas, speech is fine, as long as it's hifi.