Cytomic "The Drop" Resonant Filter

[ariston]

This looks to be a near-perfect, well thought out list of parameters. Love the keytrack, the different trigger source options and frequency step! Please don't "Drop" any of these features, they all sound essential to me.

What does the circuit noise parameter do? Is it there to add some subtle authenticity, or will it be plainly audible?

[Melvin J.]

It all looks pretty fantastic to me. I wouldn't change a thing.

[Frantz]

I am looking forward to demoing this. It looks very well specified.

LfoWidth - smooth change from saw up, to triangle, to saw down

Are saw up, triangle, and saw down the only LFO waveforms? No sine, random, square, or sample&hold? I would especially like to have sample&hold.

[andy-cytomic]

I am looking forward to demoing this. It looks very well specified.

LfoWidth - smooth change from saw up, to triangle, to saw down

Are saw up, triangle, and saw down the only LFO waveforms? No sine, random, square, or sample&hold? I would especially like to have sample&hold.

There is no sin shape. That was once knob I did away with. I did try out a version that had button / knob called "sin" which would either waveshape to sin, or cross fade to sin (ie sin (saw/tri) or mix*sin + (1-mix)*saw/tri, but I didn't think it was worth it for such a small change in sound for the extra cpu it would take. Bandlimiting a variable exponential shape is a very tricky thing to do, and something you will see in no other plugin on the planet. It also ended up being not as rhythmic as the sharper pointed triangle shape, so I figured that this would be just one of those quirks to the plugin that would give it a certain sound. I have actually spent around the same amount of time on the LFO as I have on the filter modelling! Even just getting the exponential shape control to have an even spread of values was incredibly difficult.

You get Sqr from the Exponential shape control knob at either extreme. You get sample and hold by using the Random knob, which randomises the end points of the lfo. So at small values you just get a little bit of variation right through to completely random ramps or steps.

Here is a pdf of the shapes you can get, where the top plots can all be warped from linear through to exponential to almost a right angle as shown in the second plot:

http://www.cytomic.com/files/dsp/thedrop-lfoshapes.pdf

PS: the width control will generate normal pulse width modulation sounds when the exp control is at full

[andy-cytomic]

This looks to be a near-perfect, well thought out list of parameters. Love the keytrack, the different trigger source options and frequency step! Please don't "Drop" any of these features, they all sound essential to me.

What does the circuit noise parameter do? Is it there to add some subtle authenticity, or will it be plainly audible?

The circuit noise control be plainly audible if you turn it right up. It will model the noise in various critical components in the circuit, and delivers results that are quite different to just feeding the input with some hiss. This is the final area of modelling I need to attend to, all the audio demos to date have no noise modelling in them.

[andy-cytomic]

Thanks to everyone that gave the thumbs up to the parameter list. I thought I may have scared everyone away for a minute as it looks kinda daunting if you don't hide all those parameters on a well laid out gui! It's always good to hear positive feedback, but if anyone has any criticism or has any other questions please let me know as well!

[Frantz]

Andy,

I have actually spent around the same amount of time on the LFO as I have on the filter modelling!

Thanks for the detailed response. The LFO design looks elegant and powerful. I can definitely live without Sine given all of the other possibilities.

Could you also explain the difference between Unipolar and Bipolar:

LfoMode - Unipolar, Unipolar * Env, Bipolar, Bipolar * Env

I thought I may have scared everyone away for a minute as it looks kinda daunting if you don't hide all those parameters on a well laid out gui!

As long as there are sensible defaults for all the parameters, I would rather have them available so I can tweak them if the need arises. Another idea is to have an Easy mode with just the essentials visible and an Advanced mode with all parameters displayed.

Really looking forward to testing this out.

Regards,
Mike

[michu]

Andy, do you plan to include "unquantized" BPM sync, as found in one of your older plug-ins?

[Nig]

it's nice to see the hype around this again cause its something I'm really looking forward to, although in a way I'm kinda glad it didn't end up being released in December cause I spent triple what I intended to

[hatethatiloveyou]

okay you can release it now
thanks

[MFXxx]

okay you can release it now
thanks

Cytomic announces "The Drop" resonant filter plugin

Submitted by admin on 26 May, 2011 - 14:09

Prospective release date ?

[andy-cytomic]

Andy, do you plan to include "unquantized" BPM sync, as found in one of your older plug-ins?

Hey Michu. I do like having "almost bpm" synced times, but for this plugin instead of having a bunch of modes to select for the lfo rate there there is just a bpm sync switch. The way to get "off" times is to dial in the time you want, and then use the LfoFreqScale knob to slightly increase the rate of the lfo. The Scale knob goes from x1 (ie do nothing to the frequency) with very fine movement at the start so you can easily dial in say 1.02 or some other subtly off time scaling, but then the granularity of the knob gets faster and faster up to x65536, which is 16 octaves of scaling. If you want a slightly lower time then all you need to do is dial in the lower bpm sync time and then scale up by 1.9.

So the rate scale not only takes care of off timings but also has another advantage. You you dial in the main LFO frequency to what you want and then, when it takes your fancy, rock out tweaking the LFO scale knob before slamming it back down to the bottom and you're back to the original time with the auto triggering taking care of getting the rest.

[michu]

Andy, do you plan to include "unquantized" BPM sync, as found in one of your older plug-ins?

Hey Michu. I do like having "almost bpm" synced times, but for this plugin instead of having a bunch of modes to select for the lfo rate there there is just a bpm sync switch. The way to get "off" times is to dial in the time you want, and then use the LfoFreqScale knob to slightly increase the rate of the lfo. The Scale knob goes from x1 (ie do nothing to the frequency) with very fine movement at the start so you can easily dial in say 1.02 or some other subtly off time scaling, but then the granularity of the knob gets faster and faster up to x65536, which is 16 octaves of scaling. If you want a slightly lower time then all you need to do is dial in the lower bpm sync time and then scale up by 1.9.

So the rate scale not only takes care of off timings but also has another advantage. You you dial in the main LFO frequency to what you want and then, when it takes your fancy, rock out tweaking the LFO scale knob before slamming it back down to the bottom and you're back to the original time with the auto triggering taking care of getting the rest.

kinda exactly what i wanted to read i like the way you think, sir

[MFXxx]

Hi Andy

Any closer to a release date. Want to get this when released and need to budget. Money keeps getting swallowed up by other scene releases at the moment; FF Saturn, UBK-1, Minitaur and so on grrr

Know it's going to be worth the wait but an ETA and price would be nice please.

[meloco_go]

Know it's going to be worth the wait but an ETA and price would be nice please.

Andy made a post on GS regarding what he's up to
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/7653774-post130.html

He had a secong son born in Feb and obviously we all can understand that he needs some time=)
Congrats and best wishes for him and his family!