Cytomic "The Drop" Resonant Filter

[Bathrobe]

Thesys actually has a little synth so it does output audio
Happy sidechaining.

[andy-cytomic]

Thesys actually has a little synth so it does output audio
Happy sidechaining.

Can you output the step sequencers as audio?

[VariKusBrainZ]

Thesys actually has a little synth so it does output audio
Happy sidechaining.

Can you output the step sequencers as audio?

Yes

[homunculus]

Here are some filter sweeps so everyone can get a taste for what the upcoming Stave Var filter will sound like compared to the other circuit models. These examples have a lot of drive to try and highlight how each circuit model responds differently:

www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-lp2-cascade.mp3
www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-lp2-sallenkey.mp3
www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-lp2-statevar.mp3
www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-hp2-cascade.mp3
www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-hp2-sallenkey.mp3
www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-hp2-statevar.mp3

Yummy gooey deliciousness!! Can't wait to see how you apply these modeling techniques on an EQ!

[sqigls]

I'm having farty noises coming from the Drop when I try to render or Freeze it. I never noticed before, but it's quite hideous. I'm basically f**ked, as there's no way to render it. I'm at 24/48… The Drop is running at the recommended processing rates. Cubase 6.5.5 on OSX 10.8.5 The Drop v.9.18
Any ideas as to what it may be? I'll try to render at 2x (was at 4x) oversampling now and see how it goes… like i say though, I've rendered a lot of stuff with the Drop involved, but never heard it make this distortion before.

EDIT: I just rendered the master at 24/48 with the drop set at 2x render oversampling and the noise seems to be gone.

[KnickersDown]

Thanks Andy. Yes, I realised after some experimentation that nearly all plugins have this behaviour. I can't snap a value from 5 to 127 instantly. They all smooth and ramp the values. As you say, some devs will predict what people are going to want to do when making their plugs. On the impOSCar the smoothing is limited when you send aftertouch to the filter but when you send it elsewhere is smooths it more.

Incidentally, just sending audio to the drop as FM is interesting but not what I want to achieve. It makes the filter sound like a ring mod.

This is what I'm trying to achieve with the drop...



I'm looking at silent way right now but I can't get it to work properly without hardware.

Can't wait for the OSCar filter. It was a very cleverly designed synth that was complete rubbish to use. The filter was so sweet on it but the envelopes always introduced a crappy attack even at the lowest value. I still celebrate the day I got rid of it.

[mystran]

I've been using an adaptive scheme the last few years, that also looks at the timing between subsequent CC messages to try to improve responsiveness while still smoothing somewhat slower sweeps too. The basic idea is to use longer interpolation time (I just do lerp-segments) while the CC messages are sparse, and shorten on the fly when there's more of them arriving (basically, predict when the next would arrive, and add a bit of "safety margin"). It's not exactly perfect, but helps a bit with the low MIDI resolution.

[xiphiuz]

Here are some filter sweeps so everyone can get a taste for what the upcoming Stave Var filter will sound like compared to the other circuit models. These examples have a lot of drive to try and highlight how each circuit model responds differently:

www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-lp2-cascade.mp3
www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-lp2-sallenkey.mp3
www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-lp2-statevar.mp3
www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-hp2-cascade.mp3
www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-hp2-sallenkey.mp3
www.cytomic.com/files/thedrop-sweeps-hp2-statevar.mp3

Just perfecet Andy. I must say every filter has its beauty, but can't wait to play with this new one!
I also use this filter a lot on other virtual, but also hardware synths that don't have such nice filters themselves.

So after this birth, the ladder?

[MFXxx]

Thanks for the updates Andy. HArd work is certainly paying off...

The Statevar hp2 filter sounds amazing...can't wait.

Just out of interest (and this is a long way off request) as sidechainings popped up, vst3 any plans with news that Steinberg are dropping deveoplment?

[andy-cytomic]

Thanks for the updates Andy. HArd work is certainly paying off...

The Statevar hp2 filter sounds amazing...can't wait.

Just out of interest (and this is a long way off request) as sidechainings popped up, vst3 any plans with news that Steinberg are dropping deveoplment?

I use Juce for my plugin wrapping and someone in the community has done a vst3 wrapper, so as soon as it is added to Juce I'll be able to support vst3 as well.

[andy-cytomic]

I'm having farty noises coming from the Drop when I try to render or Freeze it. I never noticed before, but it's quite hideous. I'm basically f**ked, as there's no way to render it. I'm at 24/48… The Drop is running at the recommended processing rates. Cubase 6.5.5 on OSX 10.8.5 The Drop v.9.18
Any ideas as to what it may be? I'll try to render at 2x (was at 4x) oversampling now and see how it goes… like i say though, I've rendered a lot of stuff with the Drop involved, but never heard it make this distortion before.

EDIT: I just rendered the master at 24/48 with the drop set at 2x render oversampling and the noise seems to be gone.

That doesn't sound good! Can you please email me the project with a single track that you are freezing / bouncing, and a small chunk of audio as well? I will keep it all in the strictest confidence and never share your song nor audio with anyone else, but it can really be useful for debugging what is going on. I'll post back here once I've had a look into things so everyone can be informed in case they also run into this issue.

[andy-cytomic]

Thanks Andy. Yes, I realised after some experimentation that nearly all plugins have this behaviour. I can't snap a value from 5 to 127 instantly. They all smooth and ramp the values. As you say, some devs will predict what people are going to want to do when making their plugs. On the impOSCar the smoothing is limited when you send aftertouch to the filter but when you send it elsewhere is smooths it more.

Incidentally, just sending audio to the drop as FM is interesting but not what I want to achieve. It makes the filter sound like a ring mod.

This is what I'm trying to achieve with the drop...



I'm looking at silent way right now but I can't get it to work properly without hardware.

Can't wait for the OSCar filter. It was a very cleverly designed synth that was complete rubbish to use. The filter was so sweet on it but the envelopes always introduced a crappy attack even at the lowest value. I still celebrate the day I got rid of it.

I've decided to add a glide knob instead of just the "smoothing on / off" button, that way you will be able to get variable smoothing like you do on midi notes directly on the synth, which combined with midi learn will get you where you want to be.

For the sidechain input don't send it audio (eg oscillator), sent it cv (eg dc coupled stepped values).

[andy-cytomic]

I've been using an adaptive scheme the last few years, that also looks at the timing between subsequent CC messages to try to improve responsiveness while still smoothing somewhat slower sweeps too. The basic idea is to use longer interpolation time (I just do lerp-segments) while the CC messages are sparse, and shorten on the fly when there's more of them arriving (basically, predict when the next would arrive, and add a bit of "safety margin"). It's not exactly perfect, but helps a bit with the low MIDI resolution.

Thanks for posting mystran! I already use something a bit more advanced than this, it's an adaptive system that looks at both the interval between incoming events (midi or automation etc) as well as how far away you need to travel to get to the end point. This fails completely when you have very spaced apart events that don't have large transitions but you still want fast transitions between them, for example a step sequence 1/8th note that you want a fast glide transition on the steps. In this case you really need a different algorithm since these steps are exactly the ones my adaptive system makes smooth, but in this case the user actually wants a basic one pole low pass where they can adjust the time constant to produce the quick glide steps. There are really a few modes I think may be useful, glide1 (one pole low pass), glide2 (two pole low pass), slew (constant rate stepping so you can make triangle and trapezoidal shapes), and dynamic (take into account time and amplitude deltas, which is great to smooth out manual wobbles done with a hardware controller).

[KnickersDown]

I've decided to add a glide knob instead of just the "smoothing on / off" button, that way you will be able to get variable smoothing like you do on midi notes directly on the synth, which combined with midi learn will get you where you want to be.

This is fantastic. Thank you so much Andy. This is such a great plugin and the company behind it is unbelievably good. I really can't wait for this. I'm beside myself with excitement.

[mystran]

Thanks for posting mystran! I already use something a bit more advanced than this, it's an adaptive system that looks at both the interval between incoming events (midi or automation etc) as well as how far away you need to travel to get to the end point. This fails completely when you have very spaced apart events that don't have large transitions but you still want fast transitions between them, for example a step sequence 1/8th note that you want a fast glide transition on the steps.

Oh I see. Just haven't seen such schemes discussed that much, so figured I'd mention. Yeah, as I described it, such a scheme works pretty well for smoothing manual MIDI control (ie human turning a knob, or moving mouse, or whatever) and miserably with intentionally stepped automation as generated by machines. To be honest, I never tried to solve the latter problem.