Valo - public beta demo, second attempt

[bwwd]

No matter how hard i try i just CAN'T make your synth play brass sounds , something is not right with filter nevelope attack , you could look at it and maybe fix this ? brass are made by increasing attack , when i have attack at 36 then it should make some brass sound but it doesnt.It seems like it just delays attack like AMP envelope.There is very small brassy sound sometimes but its way much tooooooo small.
Check the video , you can see where is attack envelope in filter section on synth1 and this lets me made this kind of fanfare/brass sounds:

[xparis001]

touching on what bwwd said, I think that (if I'm correct) it sounds like you're using exponential curves for the envelopes. iirc, most analog synth envelopes are logarithmic in nature.

to get the typical analog brass sound, you need that "pwa" type sound in the filter that can only come from a logarithmic curve.

a switch for LINEAR/LOGARITHMIC/EXPONENTIAL curves would be sweet...

[streifentier]

Hello,
if you like,
you can find
some more patches
(86 now)
for Valo: ......... here

and an mp3 demo
of some of them .......... here.
Cheers, V.

[mystran]

touching on what bwwd said, I think that (if I'm correct) it sounds like you're using exponential curves for the envelopes. iirc, most analog synth envelopes are logarithmic in nature.

Most analog synths (if I'm not mistaken) would have either linear or "capacitor charge/discharge" type curves the latter of which are exponential decay, though in case of attack they do "decay" upwards, which if I'm not mistaken is often called "logaritmic" (which isn't correct since logarithmic curve is strictly speaking different, and rather harder to synthesize and rarely ever done as far as I know).

I'm using the capacitor charge/discharge model (which in analog envelope generator I think is a bit cheaper and hence a lot more common than linear slopes) for all of attack/decay/release but in case of attack/release the target "voltage" is set somewhat higher for attack than you might see (especially on old) analogs, which gives the result that Valo's attack will appear slightly more linear. The release curve is also similarly "cut" in order to let the envelope "finish" while an analog can just let it decay to zero (well, I could do that for filter as well, though in case of amp-envelope, it makes sense to finish it so the voice can be killed from taking CPU).

The modulation from the envelope is patched to "1V/Oct" input on the filter, which means in order to plot the raw envelope output on spectrogram (say using high filter resonance) you need to set the spectrogram for logarithmic frequency scale.

Synth1 that was mentioned, behaves the same as Valo, except the attack seems to be perfectly linear (again, plot it on logarithmic scale or it'll look like exponential growth). There's a difference in modulation amounts though: in Valo you'll scale the modulation, patch it to filter 1V/Oct and that's it (like it would usually be if you did this on an analog modular, AFAIK). In Synth1, it'll do something funny, taking the cutoff and the maximum filter cutoff (or minimum if inverted), and then scales the output such that at maximum modulation it'll peak at the maximum filter cutoff (which you'd need a special circuit for, I think).

Anyway, the practical result is that in Valo you might sometimes need to raise the cutoff a bit to get the modulation go as high as you want (usually not much, unless you want it fully open) and there's nothing to prevent you from setting modulation go beyond the audible range (well, it'll internally cap the filter frequency somewhat after half the host sampling-rate 'cos going higher would just cause tons of aliasing for little practical effect, but that has nothing to do with modulations which should be totally sample-rate independent) so you might not want to use maximum modulation when your cutoff is high already, unless you really want to open it fully, then stay that way until it decays into the audible range again (which is a perfectly valid thing to do as far as I'm concerned).

If you still think it's not behaving like I'm describing, you can send me an .fxp and a sound-demo, and I'll see if it sounds the same here, and if that's what it should sound like. If you think the behavior of Valo isn't the best possible, then you're welcome to argue. As for behaving like an analog... technically speaking Valo isn't an analog model, but in this case I think it behaves more or less like most (similarly 1V/Oct patched) analogs would.

[mystran]

a switch for LINEAR/LOGARITHMIC/EXPONENTIAL curves would be sweet...

I might consider linear attack as an option in the (probably not near) future. As for exponential growth (if that's what you mean) I think it's rather unlikely but never say never I guess.

[Leslie Sanford]

Hello,
if you like,
you can find
some more patches
(86 now)
for Valo: ......... here

and an mp3 demo
of some of them .......... here.
Cheers, V.

Those sound great!

[Leslie Sanford]

Most analog synths (if I'm not mistaken) would have either linear or "capacitor charge/discharge" type curves the latter of which are exponential decay, though in case of attack they do "decay" upwards, which if I'm not mistaken is often called "logaritmic" (which isn't correct since logarithmic curve is strictly speaking different, and rather harder to synthesize and rarely ever done as far as I know).

ADSR Envelope

(the above page has a graph illustrating what you're describing)

[mystran]

No matter how hard i try i just CAN'T make your synth play brass sounds , something is not right with filter nevelope attack , you could look at it and maybe fix this ? brass are made by increasing attack , when i have attack at 36 then it should make some brass sound but it doesnt.It seems like it just delays attack like AMP envelope.There is very small brassy sound sometimes but its way much tooooooo small.

I'm not really a sound designer, much less of a keyboard player, but maybe try something like this (mp3/fxp) as a starting point (you'll need the unstable to load that patch, I'm afraid )?

[mystran]

Most analog synths (if I'm not mistaken) would have either linear or "capacitor charge/discharge" type curves the latter of which are exponential decay, though in case of attack they do "decay" upwards, which if I'm not mistaken is often called "logaritmic" (which isn't correct since logarithmic curve is strictly speaking different, and rather harder to synthesize and rarely ever done as far as I know).

ADSR Envelope

(the above page has a graph illustrating what you're describing)

Yeah the graph pretty much looks like what comes out of envelope generators in Valo; though like said, you'll need to plot with logarithmic scale if you try to plot it on spectrogram using high-resonance filter, and the attack is slightly more linear than what is drawn in that illustration (edit: not sure actually, the illustration does seem slightly stylished though), though wouldn't be surprised if that was the case for the module in question as well.

[mystran]

Ok, here's an actual image of Valo's filter in self-oscillation, with attack/decay/release all set to 1.5sec, and sustain set at 50%, as drawn by WaveCandy set to essentially logarithmic frequency scale (as seen on left in the picture:


And the Synth1 mentioned would look pretty much the same, but the attack-curve would be a straight line.

Oh and the sharp line at the beginning is just because I set the amplitude-envelope attack essentially instant so it shows as some sort of a click in the FFT spectrogram.

[bwwd]

Oh yeah i managed to get this little brassy sound but nothing bigger that that , its just when i move attack to the very end it doesnt change the sound when itts from 0.64 to the 10.000 s , i dont know why , in synth 1 ut delays filter and make the sound sweeeeep nicely.I cant do it here.Envelope attack is still the same its not delayed , you cant make filter sweep.
Yes im sure you have to redo/fix whole filter envelope cause it isnt right and its very important part of the synth , doestn respond correctly , i have JP8K and it acts very similar to synth1 with envelope so im sure it works right.I can make sweeps and long brass sounds,i have A 74 D 84 S 35 and it makes WWWWOOOOWWW sound like a cat( if you know what kind of sound i mean) but its impossible to do it right now in valo.
In JP8K filter envelope is very good for pluck sounds but i dont like to make brass sounds with JP its just not right for it in my opinion , i am more satisfied with synth1 when i want to make brassy sounds.Attack and decay are the reason , i dont know how to make synths but i know how my jp acts when i making some sounds on it and i see and hear the difference , some sounds are eeasier to make some are harder.
----
Edit , ok i did some kind of sweep but i had to use high amount of envelope knob value to do this so it might be the problem that its too soft.
Well A D and R are in S(econds) but Sustain are in % , its confusing so what are the values ? I get used to 0-128 so maybe thats why i have problems .

[mystran]

Oh yeah i managed to get this little brassy sound but nothing bigger that that , its just when i move attack to the very end it doesnt change the sound when itts from 0.64 to the 10.000 s , i dont know why , in synth 1 ut delays filter and make the sound sweeeeep nicely.I cant do it here.Envelope attack is still the same its not delayed , you cant make filter sweep.

Well it definitely does modify the attack here. It should. If you start relatively high and have the modulation set to relatively high as well, then it'll go over audible range quite fast (which Synth1 won't let you do, since it scales to modulation amount down when you increase cutoff), but even then any sweep that remains in the audio range should becomes slower as the attack time is increased (and it should slow down all the way to 10 seconds, the times it reports are supposed to be accurate).

If increasing attack after half-way doesn't make any difference whatsoever, then it sounds like there's a bug somewhere. Could you try setting sustain to 0, decay to minimum, then try attack with 2 seconds and 10 seconds, envelope amount to maximum (cutoff at half-way should be fine for this) and then play a note and see (for each attack time) how long does it take before the cutoff drops down? If that doesn't give you 2 seconds vs. 10 seconds times from note-on to cutoff drop, then there indeed is some problem somewhere that doesn't happen on my computer.

[bwwd]

Its ok it acts like on your cpu but i saw that S in AMP section is causing me this problem with brass sound and i have to keep the small amount to get those sounds , in synth1 it doesnt matter i have S amp on maximum and it doesnt act like Valo.I dont know its hard to test it like that maybe you could take some synth envelopes as reference and do them similar thats my suggestion.I cant tell that synth1 is working 100% like synth should , i can pull jp and test envelopes if you want but its easier to get some soft synth and take it as reference.
Oh by the way JP have excellent key tracking on filter , could you make it similar on your synth ? Its very sensitive , it sends less amount of filter to higher notes when its on low values and sends small amount to low notes when its on high values and i mean VERY small so they are hard to hear sometimes.
So when you play arpeggio with bass notes and high notes and have low amount of keytracking then you hear only bass notes without any high notes and when you have high amount then you hear very good high notes + bass notes but very silent

[streifentier]

Hello,
if you like,
you can find
some more patches
(86 now)
for Valo: ......... here

and an mp3 demo
of some of them .......... here.
Cheers, V.

Those sound great!

Thanks!

[BFunKu]

This Synth needs a Arp and/or Step-Seq and it would be Killer.