Link: Venom VB-303 VSTi (Beta release)

[Crackbaby]

Sounds great but it's so small! I have to squint my eyes in order to see :S

(24" 1920*1080)

The buttons are very small in size and i need to pull them quit a bit to the side in order to flip them.


But great sound

[mztk]

yeah antto: 'tb303' and 'bassline' are global
trademarks almost on a par with 'levi's' these days.
even yer granny knows what a 303 is now (yours does,
anyway..)

i like the lcd where it is (like ml303), but still
can't see what the sequencer note display will be like.
can we have some more info on that? btw, the display on
energyxt is very good for this kind of prog'ing.
you could maybe make good use of flip tabs to toggle views
on accents, slides, octs, lengths etc. and save space.

[antto]

this will be the size of the skin.. not any bigger.. my screen is 1152x864

Kriminal: i'm not saying it's coincidence.. the "VB-303" part is already in all the beta versions i released, and i haven't had any trouble with that..
i don't think i'm doing anything wrong or bad.. Roland have discontinued that hardware product long ago (before i was even born.. wtf)

lazydog: to be clear: the LCD is capable of showing one octave of a piano and 16 notes on it.. but this is not a way of editing a pattern, since the LCD is not clickable.. this is only for visualisation purposes
programing patterns is done the way it's done on the original too (slightly improved actually) where you write notes and timing information sepparately (or TAP-write) .. watch some TB-303 programming videos if you aren't familiar..

[Kriminal]

this will be the size of the skin.. not any bigger.. my screen is 1152x864

Kriminal: i'm not saying it's coincidence.. the "VB-303" part is already in all the beta versions i released, and i haven't had any trouble with that..
i don't think i'm doing anything wrong or bad.. Roland have discontinued that hardware product long ago (before i was even born.. wtf)

im not saying youre doing anything wrong, but watch your back

to make life easier for yourself from the get go, a diff GUI would have been an easy option

sure, its nice to have a familiar look of the thing your are emulating (done a few myself) , but to look this simialr, almost photo realistic, might be pushy it a tad

[mikebenson]

so this is roughly the layout..
i think i'll keep the LCD there, maybe i'll adjust it slightly lower so there's enough room to put the "VB-303" logos and stuff above it

usually when you adjust the distortion, you'd also want to touch the synth Volume knob, so i think the distortion should be on the same page as the synth front panel..
i could put it horizontally right between the black/orange toolbar-thing, and the synth.. it won't take much space, the height of the whole thing would be not more than 400 to 420 pixels..

I think it looks quite good. I've been waiting for this, and checking back here every month or so. Thanks for the update.

[mztk]

'quite good'
....

[Z3R0T0N1N]

...im not saying youre doing anything wrong, but watch your back

...

sure, its nice to have a familiar look of the thing your are emulating (done a few myself) , but to look this simialr, almost photo realistic, might be pushy it a tad

@Antto: It looks truly excellent, and I am very excited to get my hands on it
But I see Krim's point, too...

I am in absolute agreement with you on the point that you aren't doing anything wrong, or even questionable. But Roland has been awful about this stuff. They just count on the fact that they have more legal resources than small developers, so even though they are in the wrong, they can still get their way because it will never make it to court.

I do wonder how much one would have to change it before Roland would back off...
ABL went pretty extreme with the yellow and silicon-look buttons, and I wonder how much of that was forced by Roland? I don't know if it was at all, but I kind of assumed.

Well, hopefully you can get a oopy to most of us before you get the C&D letter I love the GUI!

[sackley]

Antto,

Add another fan to your list! For an hour I've been listening to the same 4 randomized patterns with some 808 samples all bussed to NastyDLA with slow LFOs modulating the cutoff, res, and Venoms send amount.... so tasty!

Keep working on it! It will be epic!

Cheers,

Sack

[mztk]

you'll prob get away with it if you remove the bassline
trademark and the 'a' that suggests roland's 'r'.
and eventually m-audio's 'venom' will go away

[antto]

m-audio released their synth AFTER i did mine (meeh.. i don't mind it)
that 'r' thing you mention.. it's a speck.. my CAT has probably been messing around on my desktop

guys: thanks for the great words ;]

i'm working on the import/export functions right now..
import/export *.nsm (sequencer memory files)
import/export patterns: up to 4 patterns can be saved into one file:
- *.nsp (raw format, but new version, old .nsp patterns will be load-able)
- *.303 (new plain-text TB-303-compatible format, easy for copy/pasting on forums etc..)
- *.pat (FreeBee (ABL2) format)

[mudpeople]

Let me tell you something funny about your Venom.

Ive been trying to find a good sequencer to run TAL Elektro in my live setup, and up til last night it was leading nowhere.

I wanted something without too many extra features in the way liek Thesys, something easier to alter than an analog-style step seq like Step4FREE, but most importantly something with variable note-length if at all possible...

For fun I threw in the last Venom beta and set everything so it was only outputting MIDI to Elek7ro.

Its everything Ive been searching for The note length slider is the real killer app, nothing else Ive found has anything like that, things that do allow control of note lengths were things like Thesys, which rules, but for simple mono-stepping a bassline and altering it quickly from a single screen its not ideal. The 'alt prog' button makes entering notes superfast even with just the mouse.

Its now the second 'Most Essential' tool in my live setup, sitting there looking slick with AD Tattoo (Your beta is already on the same level as Tattoo in my mind which is quite a wonderful thing )

Im still drooling for the next version, especially now that you're getting into imports The one thing that made me prefer ABL2 above others is the piles of classic patterns to get ideas from but mostly just to enjoy the memories and remind myself how much I love that damn silver box. Which i try to do at least daily.

I can't wait til Im programming both Venom and Elek7ro lines with MIDI, the bass is the only thing im still using the mouse for...

[antto]

sadly, the "step length per step" feature was part of the old sequencer
the new one is more concentrated on the 303 patterns and programing

btw.. Venom beta sends midi OUT ? (i don't remember)

[antto]

pattern/memory export is completed..
here's a sample of the new S303FF/P (*.303) file format

Code: Select all

S303FF/P
; @VER: 1000
; VB-303

TM: GGGG GGGG (8)
PM: a(U), a(D), a(D), a#, a(D), c#(U), c#(D), a#
EOP;

TM: GGGG GGGG (8)
PM: a(UAS), a(DA), a(DA), a#(A), a(D), c#(UA), c#(D), a#(A)
EOP;

TM: GGG OGO GGO -GG (12T)
PM: c(DAS), b(AS), g(UD), d(A), e(UD), f#(UA), a#(S), d
EOP;

[mudpeople]

Lol

I was surprised too when I found its name in the 'monitor' dropdown menu in Ableton.

Its only on the one with the big red bar at the bottom, and it seems to be sending only notes, when i tried the accent nothing happend, and the slide turned the 16ths into 8ths for some reason.

And its not a big deal that you scrapped that feature, its pretty strange, almost (only almost) overly awkward when programming 303 lines. Ill just keep using the big-red-bar beta

Its somewhat fitting that it did something you didn't expect, Roland didn't expect ANYTHING like what happened when they released the original for guitaritsts' demo recordings So you're keeping the tradition :DDDD

[antto]

so the midi out is in beta2.. i guess i've used standard SE modules and took the CV out of the sequencer (which is crappy indeed)
a few days ago i "cleaned" the SE project from old things, and indeed there were some SE MIDI modules around, some of them weren't even connected to anything..