Digi 002 works w/Silent Way (edit - well, not really)

[bsmith23]

I'm under the impression that the a stock 002 is not DC coupled. The 192I/O and 96I/O definitely have DC blocking caps on their outputs. I used to have a BLA modified FireWire 1814 and one of the modifications they made to that device was removing the DC blocking caps. I'll bring an 002 and an 003 home with me tonight and report back with my results.

I emailed BLA to get some clarity on what is going on with the 002r's in's and outs. Here's their reply:

There are no output coupling caps on the line outputs of the 002R. There are inductors on all of the inputs and outputs, but DC will still pass through an inductor. We don't alter any aspect of that portion of the circuitry. It shouldn't be much of a big deal if you want to remove them.

[OctopusEmpire]

ahhhh, makes sense now. Yeah I am using the one that shows up listed as an effect, it was the only one i noticed.
I'll have a look for the other one when I get home and use that one instead, awesome thanks again.

[OctopusEmpire]

I've just got home and checked with the DC offset and you're right in your suspicions OS. The LFO and step LFO still work ok but the filter cutoff voltage does settle back to the front panel setting reasonably quickly when you stop moving the offset.

Have to buy a MOTU interface after all.

[os]

OK, thanks for confirming.

[bsmith23]

So it is working in pro tools le 8.03 now, albeit with a lexicon mpx500 taking the cv over spdif.
Great stuff - just got a kraftzwerg today, and silent way gives me glide which the synth doesn't have on it's own, and on top of that the cv voice control seems much more solid than the midi the kraftzwerg comes with, pitch bend just works, tracks perfect, etc.. Knock on wood.
The plugin is wrapped with vst to rtas adapter from fxpansion. I use an instrument track to calibrate and control pitch with and an aux track which hooks to the silent way instance to handle gate with (pitch comes out left side of lexicon and gate comes out the right).
Sorry about the false alarm on the digi interface by the way, but at least there's this.

[os]

Great news! I'll have to extend my marketing efforts to the ProTools community.

[bsmith23]

An LFO signal is just like an audio signal i.e. AC, just very slow.

So now that I've got a lexi mpx 500 and left and right are doing pitch and gate, respectively, yeah, the lfo works great out of the digi outputs.
Now I'm kind of spooked about trying to run other things that may be dc out of the digi's outputs, (although I've checked out most things, and with the exception of pitch, it looks pretty good for a few minutes at least).
So how about like gate, trigger, envelope - what - if anything - else should work safely 'just like an audio signal'?

Another thing I want to ask about is here and there I will be going along and after a long while pitch will just kind of freak out and start playing randomish pitches instead of tracking. I've found that just removing and reinserting the plug in clears the deck, so to speak. When I've seen this I've been in pro tools with the wrapped version, but I think I saw it happen in numerology once too. Any ideas what is going on with this?

[os]

So how about like gate, trigger, envelope - what - if anything - else should work safely 'just like an audio signal'?

Anything that doesn't need to sustain a voltage for a long period. So triggers, short envelopes, LFOs etc. should be OK. Gates might be OK, depending on whether your synth is picky about voltages.

Another thing I want to ask about is here and there I will be going along and after a long while pitch will just kind of freak out and start playing randomish pitches instead of tracking. I've found that just removing and reinserting the plug in clears the deck, so to speak. When I've seen this I've been in pro tools with the wrapped version, but I think I saw it happen in numerology once too. Any ideas what is going on with this?

That's a new one on me. Can you tell whether it's the plug-in output that's going weird, or whether the CV signal is getting corrupted further down the chain (e.g. something else outputting signal to the same output)?

[bsmith23]

Another thing I want to ask about is here and there I will be going along and after a long while pitch will just kind of freak out and start playing randomish pitches instead of tracking. I've found that just removing and reinserting the plug in clears the deck, so to speak. When I've seen this I've been in pro tools with the wrapped version, but I think I saw it happen in numerology once too. Any ideas what is going on with this?

That's a new one on me. Can you tell whether it's the plug-in output that's going weird, or whether the CV signal is getting corrupted further down the chain (e.g. something else outputting signal to the same output)?

What's happening appears to be midi related and is only appearing between my controller and silent way and not any sequenced notes, so this is probably something to do with my specific setup (a novation remote 37 sl), and digging deeper only appears to happen when the novation is using the controllers usb to transmit midi as opposed to it's midi port. Pitch bend seems to muck it up pretty quick. Re-intantiating the voice plug in does 'clear the decks', the panic doesn't seem to do the trick. So I'll just chalk it up to more usb midi monkey business and make a point not to use it like that - I've not seen this pitch thing happen with any other instrument plugs, although I have had hung notes here and there. When it happens there's a weird low frequency echo that happens like 3 times that I only noticed by seeing meters move on my monitoring.
Anyway, no worries, I think it's just usb midi gremlins in my environment.

[bsmith23]

I feel bad about continuously asking questions. Stinking up the joint.
But.. So I realize how I'm doing this isn't supportable and is kind of different from supported methods. To run the silent way plug ins in Pro Tools I use fxpansion vst to rtas adapter, and it works great. But for some reason Trigger doesn't show up. I can see that it wraps and is there, but no matter what track type I try to use it won't show up when I go to insert a plug on a track.
During the wrap process it is the only one in the suite which shows up as having '0 input 1 output'. (Voice control for instance shows up as 1 input 6 output, trigger is the only 0 input one).
I've kind of found some workarounds with the step lfo to do what I'm trying to get done (and I can think of other ways also), but still would love to be able to use trigger. Any ideas?

***Edit*** scratch that, delete this post if you want. Bizarrely, trigger alone of all the vst plugs that get wrapped shows up in a different insert pop-up category of plug-ins - Instrument.

[os]

Yup, that's because it's an instrument plug-in aka VSTi

[bsmith23]

Another thing I want to ask about is here and there I will be going along and after a long while pitch will just kind of freak out and start playing randomish pitches instead of tracking. I've found that just removing and reinserting the plug in clears the deck, so to speak. When I've seen this I've been in pro tools with the wrapped version, but I think I saw it happen in numerology once too. Any ideas what is going on with this?

That's a new one on me. Can you tell whether it's the plug-in output that's going weird, or whether the CV signal is getting corrupted further down the chain (e.g. something else outputting signal to the same output)?

I just had to report back on this because it is the damndest thing.
Its been a while since that pitch problem quoted above occurred.
I use a novation remote 37sl controller, it has this x/y pad (which is right under the pitch bend/modulation, which I'd noticed using would sometimes trigger 'the problem'). I had a sequence playing in numerology and kind of leaned forward and rested my hand on it and - bam - there that problem was, and luckily I noticed cause and effect this time. I stopped the sequence and started messing with the pad - in the state it defaults to the top half is 'gate on' and the bottom half is 'gate off' and sweeping the x axis on the top half sweeps pitch - this then seems to be affected by pressing a keyboard key - the pitches swept seem to be affected by the velocity you touch a key with. Really bizarre! Anyway, had some fun with it - and as above I had to cycle the plug-in to get back to normalcy. I need to investigate that part of this controller further and learn how to set that thing up - there's probably some pretty fun simple touch controller stuff it can be used with in SW. Anyway, just a kind of 'eureka!' moment had to share....

[os]

Thanks for that - glad it's not a bug (phew).