Tone 2 - Saurus 2 is available

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Got another mail from Tone2, where they explain a workaround to set a pitch bend range of 1 or 2 semitones: use OSC Fine instead of the pitch as the target, a value of 100 equals two semitones. 50 is one semitone. I suppose you have to do that for both oscillators separately in this case.

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fluffy_little_something wrote:Got another mail from Tone2, where they explain a workaround to set a pitch bend range of 1 or 2 semitones: use OSC Fine instead of the pitch as the target, a value of 100 equals two semitones. 50 is one semitone. I suppose you have to do that for both oscillators separately in this case.
The mod destination "Osc Fine" is global for both Oscs while "Osc1 Fine" and Osc2 Fine" are specific for the single oscillators.
Same for some other Osc related parameters like e.g. Osc Pitch, Osc Semi etc.

Using Pitchbend for only one Osc could be quite useful to do some realtime modulation of certain Sync sounds.

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Hint: Switching Oscillator keytrack off in Saurus:

With Saurus it is also possible to do "Drone" like sounds where one oscillator stays at a constant pitch over the whole key range. To turn off the Osc keytracking for e.g. Osc2 in the mod matrix you should set the mod source to "Key", mod destination to "Osc2 Pitch" and the value to minimum (= -100).
I did some Drone like sounds for an official Saurus bank this way that was published at Tone2.
Last edited by Ingonator on Mon May 04, 2015 12:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Ingo Weidner
Win 10 Home 64-bit / mobile i7-7700HQ 2.8 GHz / 16GB RAM //
Live 10 Suite / Cubase Pro 9.5 / Pro Tools Ultimate 2021 // NI Komplete Kontrol S61 Mk1

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My bad, I had not seen the global Osc Fine option, only the 1 and 2 options :)

Just checked it, actually it works in a cumulative way. One can use the same modulation (pitch wheel -> osc fine) in two mod slots and they add up to 4 semitones when set to max. So when you set one to 50 and one to 100 you get 3 semitones. And so on...

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I'm not feeling like there are an abundance of mod slots to the extent that using more than one just for this common function is great. It's clearly a better workaround than not having one, but it seems to me that it's time this get solved for real in this otherwise great synth.

Ideally, there would be a dedicated pitch bend range parameter, spec'd in semitones. Making that change without affecting existing patches could be done I think, by converting old-style patches with mod matrix pitchbend when they were read. That seems possible, but it's clearly more work than not doing it.

Even simpler than that, and than the popup text-entry idea, and maybe actually better, would be simply to have left-and down-arrow decrement the value of the currently focused control by one, and right- and up-arrow increment it. No UI appearance change or new popup required, just that key handling. Possible complications, from my ignorant vantage point:
- Do "all" hosts pass keyboard events to plugins? I don't know how things work at that level, but since some VSTs let you type somewhere in them, it seems likely it could be made to work.
- Might there be ambiguity as to which control has the focus?
- Related, ideally, the control with the focus would be indicated in the UI somehow (highlighted background or border maybe?). Don't know how hard that is, but part of the intent of this idea is to avoid visible UI changes, so I'd suggest trying this scheme without that first, seeing if it's problematic for users.

Meta-question: Is this a good place to be talking about this? Tone2 has their own forum, and I haven't seen signs of them here, so maybe not. Still, it's clear that there are a bunch of people here with experience and interest in Saurus, so having this conversation here makes some sense. We just have ot make sure these ideas get back to Tone2 also.

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I posted some of this to the Tone2 forum too, as a reply to Markus's post about pitch bend programming.

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Well, there are 15, so even if you use 3 slots for 5 or 6 semitones (more is not that common I suppose; some hardware was set to 2 or 3 semitones), you still have 12 slots left.

Interestingly, the much more comprehensive Electra has only 10 slots per layer. Sure, one could use more than one synth layer, but I noticed that for many patches one layer is enough.

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Robmobius wrote:
Orbit-50 wrote:
KingTuck wrote:Tone2 don't offer sales as it devalues the product (their own words on that).
LOL!!! I always found that excuse, as well as many other arrogant statements made by Markus to be hilarious.

.-.
How so? U-he springs to mind (as op mentioned as well).

It's no wonder that Plugin Alliance don't do so many facebook $99 flash sales anymore. Now everyone has loads of PA's stuff. People believe that they can get any of their products for 99 bucks (if they wait). So it certainly does devalue your products if your strategy is managed badly.
in general i agree with you on that. however there's - as always - two sides to it. imagine: what would be better for you as developer, either to sell 500 copies at the regular price or to sell 5.000 copies because of discounts? i mean in the end its plain simple: if you just don't make enough money to get a living you may have to give up coding plugins (entirely) - but hey, at least you never "devalued" your work, that's great :tu:

DISCLAIMER: there was a lot of irony in my post, so please don't everything too seriously ;)

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Sim.Sky, there is more money in doing it the way u-he and Tone2 do it.

It's pretty f**king funny that Tone2 recommend you buy another one of their synths when asking about an issue you have with the current one. What other developer does that haha?

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But I guess he meant it in a nice way, after all, crossgrades are not available in their regular shop. It was generous actually because I would have gotten both Saurus and Electra for 180 instead of 250 euros. But I don't want such gifts. And oddly, although it would have been a gift, It would have been an expensive gift for me because if I had Electra, there would be no more reason for me to use Saurus, so I would have paid 180 euros effectively for Electra alone, i.e. 30 more than the regular price.

But really, that is my "fault" so to speak, not Tone2's, they were very helpful and friendly.

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Is Electra2 fully a superset of Saurus (Saurus doesn't do anything you can't do in Electra2)?

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I believe the correct plural form of Saurus is Sauri ;-P
Seriously, the two instruments are very different, from what little I've seen (I haven't had the chance to work extensively with either, yet) each has its own approach, sound and peculiarities.

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dwozzle wrote:Is Electra2 fully a superset of Saurus (Saurus doesn't do anything you can't do in Electra2)?
I still have the Electra demo on my computer. I have not tested every little feature, but yes, I would see no reason to use Saurus if I had Electra. The analog component is just one of several, but also fully equipped, with various analog imperfection settings etc.
There are all kinds of filters including Moog.

It also has an effective 3-band equalizer, which is very useful.

And it is a whole lot more flexible and user-friendly. For instance one can simply switch osc's on and off without having to turn some balance knob.

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Tone2 are always friendly, just always itching to profit too. I'm not thinking of it too critically, it's just funny.

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Best way for me to adjust pitch bend in Sarus is visually with Photosounder's Spiral (there's also a free SpiralCM version). Sometime it's not pitch perfect though depending on how many semitones you bend but works 99% of the time.

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I am just finding it so hard to spend more money on Tone2 products than I do on u-he products for which I use 100,000 more often, and so much is given away that I don't' feel like I am being penny pinched.
I will, for now at least past on saurus 2 update.
rsp
sound sculptist

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