One-Synth-Challenge 35: Diva - Submissions and gossip

[Doc Jon]

Help yourself to these which I came up with at the weekend, with some hefty EQ they will do me fine, feel free to use them or change as you wish

Kick
http://www.doctors.net.uk/DocStore/DSVi ... n=download

Snare
http://www.doctors.net.uk/DocStore/DSVi ... n=download

Hi Hat (closed)
http://www.doctors.net.uk/DocStore/DSVi ... n=download

Hi Hat (open)
http://www.doctors.net.uk/DocStore/DSVi ... n=download

Jon

[olikana]

deleted

[Bjulin]

@doc joh
i'm sure some willl appreciate your generosity but i think your offering defeats the whole point of the challenge which is for members to cook up with the synth all the sounds they need for a composition (including the drums) and get the best they can out of the synth.
one thing is to give suggestions, another is to just feed someone with the sounds (u just basically did part of the challenge for whoever will use your patches)and imo it falisfies also "the competition" aspect, if there is even one.

noone forces members here to take the challenge...there are monthly music competitions in the kvrmusiccafe if all they want is just load sounds and compose music.
but this challege is primarily about using the synth, exploring the synth capabilities to the full ...and i hope not just the preset browser.

diva has zero filter feedback filters which makes it even better than most softsynths out there for shaping percussive sounds...so not sure what particular help it needed.


@at the kick discussion on previous page
i noticed through these years on kvr how softsynths have accustomed ppl to just making kicks by modulating pitch of sines (and with softsynth's "oscillator reset" feature which is missing in diva-although it offers alternative ways of doing it)...but the most used and easy way of doing kicks in analogs always been through modulating the self oscillating filter (which creates in most cases a "dirty sine"= a sine with added harmonics) also cos most analogs didn't even have a sine as osc..or if they did it was just a slightly rounded triangle.
a sine oscillator is too sterile by itself...a triangle is bit too much...the dirty sines created by self oscillation(if the filters are emulated right) have just about the right harmonic content for a good electronic kick. . ofc depends what kind of music u make, when i need to make a more acoustick kick i personally prefer getting the starting tone by cross modulatig the oscs (FM)...
there are so many way of doing things and there are many great tutorials on the net...but still u get ppl here who in this type of challenge still turn up to ask " can someone give me a good kick patch" completely the wrong type of question in such a challenge imo.

sorry, but don't overdo it! what you say is partially true, but we're here to have fun with this, not for a bitter competition!! a kick, a snare, a closed and open hihat will surely not destroy osc! if you think, we should compete that hard, so that we should not help each other out a bit, I'm out of here in a minute...

THE ONE THING I LIKE ABOUT OSC IS THE FUN AND THE HELPFULNESS PEOPLE HAVE IN HERE!

so, thanks for the presets Doc - I'm gonna tweak them anyway

[RuediRena]

@doc joh
i'm sure some willl appreciate your generosity but i think your offering defeats the whole point of the challenge which is for members to cook up with the synth all the sounds they need for a composition (including the drums) and get the best they can out of the synth.
one thing is to give suggestions, another is to just feed someone with the sounds

sorry, but don't overdo it! what you say is partially true, but we're here to have fun with this, not for a bitter competition!! a kick, a snare, a closed and open hihat will surely not destroy osc! if you think, we should compete that hard, so that we should not help each other out a bit, I'm out of here in a minute...

THE ONE THING I LIKE ABOUT OSC IS THE FUN AND THE HELPFULNESS PEOPLE HAVE IN HERE!

so, thanks for the presets Doc - I'm gonna tweak them anyway

+1

With other synths you get a bunch of presets available for all contestants. So everyone starts on the same level as far as software is concerned and nobody ever voted against this fact naturally. If I remember correctly we gave away one of our speech patches in the Farbrausch challenge to everybody who didn't get the plugin to talk. Who cares if the manufacturer or DocJon distributes ready-mades? Those are not more that tiny elements of that musical language we all love here.

Cheers
Ruedi

[Doc Jon]

@doc joh
i'm sure some willl appreciate your generosity but i think your offering defeats the whole point of the challenge which is for members to cook up with the synth all the sounds they need for a composition (including the drums) and get the best they can out of the synth.
one thing is to give suggestions, another is to just feed someone with the sounds (u just basically did part of the challenge for whoever will use your patches)and imo it falisfies also "the competition" aspect, if there is even one.

I take your point, I suppose it depends on where you draw the line between the seriousness of the competition and the spirit of the OSC community

IMO this is no different to using presets in a challenge, my submissions usually include a mixture of 'tweaked presets' and sounds built from scratch (and I'm sure people have already found the currently available patch banks for DIVA on the U-he website). There's always kudos, and often points, given to those who produce all their sounds from scratch, but if using presets or supplied patches gets more people involved, and more tracks submitted, then I'm all for it!

Jon

[JJBiener]

Speaking of being helpful, I found something that might help out. I was having no luck getting Diva to play without noise. I am running Sonar X1 on a Win7 Toshiba i7 laptop, so I should not have had any problem with horsepower. Despite that, everything I tried to play was breaking up and dropping out. I was searching the internet for a solution when I read something about the clocking of my CPU. I was running in Balanced power mode and in Win7 Resource Monitor, the Maximum Frequency was running about 53%. When I played a few notes, the Max Freq jumped 95%+. That is when I was getting the noise. It occurred to me that with my processor running at a lower frequency, I was able to overrun the processor while my CPU usage stayed relatively low. The processor couldn't adjust speed fast enough to handle the load, hence the noise. The solution was to change my power setting from Balanced to High Performance. This caused my processor to run at a higher frequency so it wouldn't have to adjust to the load. So far this has solved the problem. I don't know how many notes I will be able to get out of Diva, but at least I can use it now.

Let me know if this helps anyone else. Thanks.

[Marando]

I read a lot of posts where people are talking about the fact that they can only hit a few notes and have their CPU going into some kind of meltdown. I experienced this too with my old but trusty Q6600 quadcore cpu.

However, it's possible to set the quality in DIVA in 4 steps:

Draft
Fast
Great
Divine

You can also chose a different quality setting for offline rendering, so you can put that one on divine!

At default, DIVA runs in Great mode, and this makes my CPU having trouble with a certain patch I made by just playing 5 notes at the same time. At draft, it only takes about 10% cpu, instead of something like 80%.

Yes, you hear a quality difference, but since I'm rendering in high quality anyway, I don't care! I can actually run a track in realtime that has 12 instances of DIVA!

Love the synth, it's awesome!

[olikana]

deleted

[Acronym]

To bring up the perfomance issues with diva again, I got problems with my c2d cpu @2,42 ghz (not gonna change anything with my pc settings, cuz the system runs & yes its a bit older, and i'm planing to update it next year..).

And it gets even worser, cuz sometimes diva produces peaks at +100dbfs.. Theres always a limiter on my master channel, so this is no big issue. But I can't participate in this OSC..

[gorgorgathgorgorgor]

I read a lot of posts where people are talking about the fact that they can only hit a few notes and have their CPU going into some kind of meltdown. I experienced this too with my old but trusty Q6600 quadcore cpu.

However, it's possible to set the quality in DIVA in 4 steps:

Draft
Fast
Great
Divine

You can also chose a different quality setting for offline rendering, so you can put that one on divine!

At default, DIVA runs in Great mode, and this makes my CPU having trouble with a certain patch I made by just playing 5 notes at the same time. At draft, it only takes about 10% cpu, instead of something like 80%.

Yes, you hear a quality difference, but since I'm rendering in high quality anyway, I don't care! I can actually run a track in realtime that has 12 instances of DIVA!

Love the synth, it's awesome!

Thanks for the tip! I'll try it at my earliest opportunity...

[V'ger]

Shame about the tech issues, but DIVA would always be a challenge on the hardware.. Sounds amazing though.

About ready made presets vs rolling-your-own - and also sound design vs song design has been a hot topic as long as I've been here and it seems never to reach a consensus..

Personally and I think for many, when making or judging it's a mix of all; sound design, composition, mix and also plugin use to varying degree. A top song with ready made patches would for me rate equally or maybe even higher as an average one even if some top patches had been made there. It's about making something noteworthy with the synth, but all have different priorities obviously.

And sharing patches just seems a very sporting thing to do imo..

[gorgorgathgorgorgor]

Shame about the tech issues, but DIVA would always be a challenge on the hardware.. Sounds amazing though.

About ready made presets vs rolling-your-own - and also sound design vs song design has been a hot topic as long as I've been here and it seems never to reach a consensus..

Personally and I think for many, when making or judging it's a mix of all; sound design, composition, mix and also plugin use to varying degree. A top song with ready made patches would for me rate equally or maybe even higher as an average one even if some top patches had been made there. It's about making something noteworthy with the synth, but all have different priorities obviously.

And sharing patches just seems a very sporting thing to do imo..

+1 here, I like to believe that my dismal record on the OSC has more to do with my rudimentary patch-work than my compositions...

[Fritze]

About ready made presets vs rolling-your-own - and also sound design vs song design has been a hot topic as long as I've been here and it seems never to reach a consensus..

I don't know the history that you obviously have here with the OSC but the rules clearly talk about the composition. I didn't find anything about preset programming.

[Urs]

Hey,

I just uploaded a new beta version of Diva. She does sound slightly different (read: better, in general), so maybe you should bounce tracks before upgrading... albeit, it contains a readme with instructions on getting sounds back...

This beta is of course also free for another 3 weeks.

Oh, there are also a few factory presets now...

http://tiny.cc/se9ve

Urs

[glokraw]

and loading presets is hardly "challenge"....

Loading them, then playing them, and then mixing them
in such a way, that the listener/voter gets more than 20 seconds
into the song, before finding the delete key, is indeed a vast challenge,
that haunts even the most famous stars every time they enter the studio.
Even Britney and J-lo sweat