[MXXX] Update to 6.01beta3 is available

[MeldaProduction]

Yeah, well, spectral thingy is kind of in my mind .

[farfadetfarfelu]

Yeah, well, spectral thingy is kind of in my mind .

In the meanwhile, Another little idea for the delay : a "freeze" or "hold" button.
When this button is pressed, the effet will hold the last piece of audio that was in the Delay buffer memory (playing it over and over just like a sampled loop).
For example a two second delay, will become a two seconds repeating loop when the hold function is pressed.

This is like a rudimentary sampler and can be very useful to build layers in a sound. I just rediscovered this on an old digitech PDS2020 effect pedal.

[MeldaProduction]

Well, noted

[VariKusBrainZ]

Yeah, well, spectral thingy is kind of in my mind .

In the meanwhile, Another little idea for the delay : a "freeze" or "hold" button.
When this button is pressed, the effet will hold the last piece of audio that was in the Delay buffer memory (playing it over and over just like a sampled loop).
For example a two second delay, will become a two seconds repeating loop when the hold function is pressed.

This is like a rudimentary sampler and can be very useful to build layers in a sound. I just rediscovered this on an old digitech PDS2020 effect pedal.

With modulatable start and end points please

[MeldaProduction]

What do you mean by that??

[mljung]

Yeah, well, spectral thingy is kind of in my mind .

[farfadetfarfelu]

-

Yeah, well, spectral thingy is kind of in my mind .

In the meanwhile, Another little idea for the delay : a "freeze" or "hold" button.
When this button is pressed, the effet will hold the last piece of audio that was in the Delay buffer memory (playing it over and over just like a sampled loop).
For example a two second delay, will become a two seconds repeating loop when the hold function is pressed.

This is like a rudimentary sampler and can be very useful to build layers in a sound. I just rediscovered this on an old digitech PDS2020 effect pedal.

With modulatable start and end points please

On the PDS2020 pedal, the delay time control is still active when the "hold" is activated, so it acts like it's modulating the length of the loop (it changes the pitch of the loop). So in a way the delay time is changing the start and end points of the loop. But it's not the same as a full-featured sampler/looper.

-

There shall be a dedicated multieffect which uses like multiple MXXX instances then (one of the many ideas resulting from MXXX Wink ).

This can be interesting as a VST and standalone app.
You could keep the grid system for the routing but with more effect slots.
For example 10 X 20 effect slots instead of the 4 x 16 in MXXX.

One MXXX possible in each slot.
To have a very open framework, useful to everyone, maybe you could consider the import of third party vst's in the effect slots.

It would need a very good preset system controlable from midi program changes.
it would need a way to do a very smooth and quiet effect on/off/bypass of each individual slot. Midi control of each effect slot on/off + midi control of some effect parameters.

It's the equivalent of a hardware effect rack or effect board on a computer.
The Xlutop chainer does this but it's pretty old now, has not been updated for a long time.
It seems like a lot of work though, don't know if there's really many people interested by this.
As of know i'm using a modular host to do this type of stuff (build chains of vst FX and control them with midi) but it would be simpler to just use the effect rack idea.

- Filter module
i still believe it's important to have a wet gain or volume control on this processor because depending on the type of filter, Q, and modulation selected it can output dramatically different levels. You wan to be able to reach to the volume control very fast instead of having to go into another processor to find a volume control.
Also a dry/wet or just a dry signal control is important and more pratical than wiring a separate bypass route for the dry signal around the filter.

- For the future : A dedicated digital lofi/bitcrusher processor
I know there is bitcrushing and sample and hold in the distortion module but they are quite limited, and they work in a strange way. The sample and hold seems to be in series after the distortion, and maybe i'm wrong but the bitchrusher seems to be in parallel.
The sample and hold is great but The bitcrusher is barely noticable when used combined with the amp sim section (maybe this can be fixed ?).

Suggested Controls for the bitcrusher module :
> Bit crushing depth from 0 bits to 16 bits
> Sample rate from 0hz to 44100 hz
> Different types of resampling (no interpolaiton, linear interpolation...)
> For the first 8 bits : Inversion of selected bits, swapping/remapping of bit values
> Anti-Aliasing on/off to insert a steep anti-aliasing filter before the samplerate reduction to remove unwanted frequencies above the limitations of the samplerate. The cutoff frequency of this filter would be related to the samplerate and could be fixed at half the sampling frequency (or kept user adjustable).

[crazyfiltertweaker]

I realized that some plugins use more CPU than others. It would be nice if you write in the manual which plugins use more which less. the best way would be rating system from 1-90% for the CPU usage that we know by reading the manual the exact use of CPU to plan the usage of the MXXX plugins.

And make many many tutorials that we all can use MXXX in the full range!

[MeldaProduction]

On the PDS2020 pedal, the delay time control is still active when the "hold" is activated, so it acts like it's modulating the length of the loop (it changes the pitch of the loop). So in a way the delay time is changing the start and end points of the loop. But it's not the same as a full-featured sampler/looper.

Hmmm, I'm not really sure how to understand this . Can you elaborate a little more?

This can be interesting as a VST and standalone app.
You could keep the grid system for the routing but with more effect slots.
For example 10 X 20 effect slots instead of the 4 x 16 in MXXX.

One MXXX possible in each slot.
To have a very open framework, useful to everyone, maybe you could consider the import of third party vst's in the effect slots.

It would need a very good preset system controlable from midi program changes.
it would need a way to do a very smooth and quiet effect on/off/bypass of each individual slot. Midi control of each effect slot on/off + midi control of some effect parameters.

It's the equivalent of a hardware effect rack or effect board on a computer.
The Xlutop chainer does this but it's pretty old now, has not been updated for a long time.
It seems like a lot of work though, don't know if there's really many people interested by this.
As of know i'm using a modular host to do this type of stuff (build chains of vst FX and control them with midi) but it would be simpler to just use the effect rack idea.

Yeah, well, something like that... there are many ideas here...
I'd like to make it user-friendly though.

- Filter module
i still believe it's important to have a wet gain or volume control on this processor because depending on the type of filter, Q, and modulation selected it can output dramatically different levels. You wan to be able to reach to the volume control very fast instead of having to go into another processor to find a volume control.
Also a dry/wet or just a dry signal control is important and more pratical than wiring a separate bypass route for the dry signal around the filter.

Added to to-do list, but not for the dry/wet - it's not such a big deal, but due to phase shifts this wouldn't work as expected at all...

- For the future : A dedicated digital lofi/bitcrusher processor
I know there is bitcrushing and sample and hold in the distortion module but they are quite limited, and they work in a strange way. The sample and hold seems to be in series after the distortion, and maybe i'm wrong but the bitchrusher seems to be in parallel.
The sample and hold is great but The bitcrusher is barely noticable when used combined with the amp sim section (maybe this can be fixed ?).

I think they work normally, all in series, it's just that the way they work is actually quite similar, so at the end one may partially cancel the other's work.

Suggested Controls for the bitcrusher module :
> Bit crushing depth from 0 bits to 16 bits
> Sample rate from 0hz to 44100 hz
> Different types of resampling (no interpolaiton, linear interpolation...)
> For the first 8 bits : Inversion of selected bits, swapping/remapping of bit values
> Anti-Aliasing on/off to insert a steep anti-aliasing filter before the samplerate reduction to remove unwanted frequencies above the limitations of the samplerate. The cutoff frequency of this filter would be related to the samplerate and could be fixed at half the sampling frequency (or kept user adjustable).

Well, I'm afraid I have to say no to this for now. I have played with this idea - every dev does, because it is easy to implement etc, but the results are just boring... Take a low-pass filter and put the bit crusher from the distortion module after it and you have the same thing...
The only way you can persuade me is to send me some really good audio examples .

[farfadetfarfelu]

[quote="MeldaProduction"

- For the future : A dedicated digital lofi/bitcrusher processor
I know there is bitcrushing and sample and hold in the distortion module but they are quite limited, and they work in a strange way. The sample and hold seems to be in series after the distortion, and maybe i'm wrong but the bitchrusher seems to be in parallel.
The sample and hold is great but The bitcrusher is barely noticable when used combined with the amp sim section (maybe this can be fixed ?).

I think they work normally, all in series, it's just that the way they work is actually quite similar, so at the end one may partially cancel the other's work.

I think i figured out something with the saturation processor : the result of the bitcrusher is very dependant on the input level.
So basically the bit crusher works fine when used on clean signals (amp sim turned of) or when the amp is used with the gain at minimum.
But as soon as you turn up the gain on the amp, the effect of the bit crusher gets lost.

So i tested things with this fx chain in mxxx :
Saturation (amp sim on only) > utility (-10db) > bandpass filter (LP24 on 20khz)> saturation (bitcrusher on only)

I tried inserting a volume control between the amp and the bitcrusher (-10dB), and the results are much better, the bit crusher can be heard on top of the distortion and do those really dirty crackling sounds on the lower bits.
Also an EQ needs to be inserted between the amp sim and the bitcrusher to lower the high end before the bitcrusher. There's something weird about the high end at the output of the amp sim, just a low pass on 20khz will change everything...

So if i'm correct, the saturation processor could be improved with some gain staging inside the plugin like a -10dB pad and a 20khz low pass filter at the output of the amp sim, and a +10dB on the plugin output to compensate or something like that.
It's weird but it seems to works,and it does really nasty sounds.

[MeldaProduction]

This is actually pretty logical - think about what a distortion / saturation does - it basically provides some smooth clipping, so the waveshape of a triangle for example becomes more like a rectangle. And what does a bit-reduction do with a rectangle? Nothing!
Well, low-pass could be added there, but personally I'm not keen to do that, 'cos the purpose of MXXX is to be able to do all these ideas and the thing is, there are many ways to modify the output of the saturator/distortion, so that it becomes more usable for additional distortion types. We'll see...

[farfadetfarfelu]

This is actually pretty logical - think about what a distortion / saturation does - it basically provides some smooth clipping, so the waveshape of a triangle for example becomes more like a rectangle. And what does a bit-reduction do with a rectangle? Nothing!
Well, low-pass could be added there, but personally I'm not keen to do that, 'cos the purpose of MXXX is to be able to do all these ideas and the thing is, there are many ways to modify the output of the saturator/distortion, so that it becomes more usable for additional distortion types. We'll see...

Yep in the end i guess i have to agree with you.
The best and most flexible way to do it is :
Amp sim > EQ > -10dB > Bitcrusher > +10dB > EQ (if you need it).
It can be done just using two instances of the saturation processor one after the other so it's not that bad.

I could have done it before with two instances of the multiband distortion but i did not. It shows how MXXX makes you want to try things and makes it easy to move around the boundaries of the individual plugins you had before.

[MeldaProduction]

Perfect!

[farfadetfarfelu]

On the PDS2020 pedal, the delay time control is still active when the "hold" is activated, so it acts like it's modulating the length of the loop (it changes the pitch of the loop). So in a way the delay time is changing the start and end points of the loop. But it's not the same as a full-featured sampler/looper.

Hmmm, I'm not really sure how to understand this . Can you elaborate a little more?

On the digitech PDS delay series, the hold functions works like this :
- Let's say you have a one second delay
- Press hold : it repeats the one second loop that's stored in the memory again and again
- While the sound is on hold and repeating, you can still use the delay time knob. It controls the length of the loop, if you shorten the delay time to 0.5 seconds, the recorded sound in the loop goes up in pitch.

But the hold function is a lot more limited than a dedicated sampler like the boss rc-20 for example.

- Filter module
i still believe it's important to have a wet gain or volume control on this processor because depending on the type of filter, Q, and modulation selected it can output dramatically different levels. You wan to be able to reach to the volume control very fast instead of having to go into another processor to find a volume control.
Also a dry/wet or just a dry signal control is important and more pratical than wiring a separate bypass route for the dry signal around the filter.

Added to to-do list, but not for the dry/wet - it's not such a big deal, but due to phase shifts this wouldn't work as expected at all...

Well i've tried to mix dry sound with the filter, i know in theory it is supposed to introduce phase shift, but in practice you want to be able to mix some dry sound when you are using the filter more as a sound effect and not as an EQ.
For example you are using a filter with a high Q to do a sweeping sound (modulating the freq), the filter is just doing a whistling or wah wah sound, you can mix it with the clean sound, it will not really be a problem. It might even do pleasant phaser like stuff.
In practice it's just a very useful feature imo, most other vst filters have a dry wet.

[farfadetfarfelu]

The panorama control in the utility seems to act more like a balance control, since the signals in and out of each processor are stereo.
Sometimes it is interesting to treat each each side of a stereo signal as if it was a mono signal and have a separate panorama control for the left and right channels.
For example let's say i'm sending a monophonic signal (voice or guitar) in MXXX and i want to pan this signal 20 degrees to the left, and 20 degrees to the right.
And then i add reverb on this voice or guitar and i want to send the wet reverb sound 80 degrees to the left and 80 degrees to the right.

To do this in MXXX i would have to use this :



Now let's say i want to add a distortion panned 45° left and 45° right, that's starting to get really messy, i have to add mixer modules before the outputs...

A way to simplify things would be to have a "stereo pan" processor with one slider for the left channel panorama, and one slider for the right channel panorama.

(please let me know if i missed another way of doing it)