FXpansion Cypher2 - Coming in 2018

[HunterKiller]

References... well you'd need to get a hold of the Eminent 310. Play it and open it up and study it. They're a hell of a lot easier to ship between countries if you're living in Europe. If you can find one. Usually someone is always selling it, somewhere. That organ is the best reference for the most popular string synth sound. Other ensembles, except the Freeman, all came later and are all variations of the Eminent design. I know also a few other organs have done this kind filtering, but it's rare, they usually don't have the string ensemble though. And later 80's organs started using FM to create their string ensembles, like Yamaha.

Yes precisely it quickly gets expensive and complex. Especially if you want to change the core timbre.
You could possibly use light curve BPF with Notch sprinkled where needed. Sometimes the fundamental and the second harmonic need to be dropped a little bit, as they are too loud, and give the impression of a synthesizer wave being passed through a chorus unit. The tempering of certain harmonics, per note is what gives that final touch that differentiates a good string synth from one that is less well designed.

[Angus_FX]

Well, we have an active OTA notch filter (actually several of them) in Amber's formant filter.

A good route may be to have a couple of different formant filters (i.e. two of the Amber v1 four-band formants configured in parallel) & give each key a balance control to route between them.

[bmrzycki]

Cypher's biggest charm to me were quirkier sounds. I hope all V1 sounds still work, it's a bit hard to tell with the new layout if the feature set is a superset of V1. To me Cypher is an excellent source of squeaky, blippy, slightly-off-center sounds. From the early demo in the first post I didn't really hear anything like that. I hope it's still part of its design for V2.

The sounds from V1 that drew me in were things like:
https://soundcloud.com/fxpansion/cypher ... -fm-robert
https://soundcloud.com/fxpansion/cypher ... ike-robert
https://soundcloud.com/fxpansion/cypher ... imal-night
https://soundcloud.com/fxpansion/fusor- ... phlex-bass
https://soundcloud.com/fxpansion/cypher-funkynightmares
https://soundcloud.com/fxpansion/cypher ... of-a-droid

[Angus_FX]

Worry not - Cypher2 is very much a superset of v1.

In the current early beta, v1 sounds aren't entirely working, but by the time we get to the release, everything except for arpeggiator settings will come across. (As with Strobe, the v2 arpeggiator is too radical a departure from v1's to read the old settings in any sensible fashion).

[acYm]

Can't put individual synth features like the envelopes / LFOs / oscillators on banks/tabs, as that's just a horrid way to work. All the important stuff needs to be on the main page at once, so you don't have to go hunting around too much to figure out how a patch works.

Can you give me an example of a synth with different backgrounds for each area? You want a different colour texture on every panel or..?

1- 100% agree. There is a use for instruments with tons of tabs everywhere, like Alchemy, for deep experimentation and such but makes it impractical to program the synth hands on with a controller and jam with it. I see Cypher as a live kinda synth, and it should stay so.

2- AAS Ultra-Analog VA-1 was a good example of how to clearly distinguish your sections in an otherwise uniform interface, if perhaps a bit lacking in subtlety.

[Angus_FX]

@ acYm - subtle it isn' t things to consider.. we already have a "theme" colour for each synth, plus one each for modulation amounts and depths. Add the LCD/LED/"on state" highlight & that's quite a lot to deal with. I'm not personally convinced more section colour is the answer. TBH, I think it's best used on the knob caps, as that allows you to create a mental connection between related or equivalent functionality in different areas (for example, anything scaled in pitch values, or anything relating to drive/distortion/gain).

Here are a couple of layouts that came from a conversation with one of the sound designers. Colours are very much work-in-progress.

3337.png

3338.png

[4damind]

For me the dark gray layout looks more pleasing for my eyes. It's similar to Strobe 2, the difference seems to be the background. Strobe 2 has this blue background with the dark theme.
Btw is there a different theme for Strobe 2 available which is not using this blue background or can this color be manually changed?

[Angus_FX]

If you open up
Program Files (x86)\FXpansion\Strobe2\Resources
or
Mac HD/Library/Application Support/FXpansion/Strobe2/Resources

You'll see a couple of style sheets in there called DefaultStyles.xml & DefaultStylesLight.xml

Both are editable. Some experimentation required. (Lots of other user modifiable XML skin files in there if you're brave...)

[KingTuck]

This all looks very cool. Has the beta technically started by the way, or is it starting soon?

[ckam03]

Really hope this comes out soon.

[david.beholder]

Got any references..? HPF isn't any harder than LP, but more than one filter per key starts to get expensive.

It would be nice to have thing in amber 2.
Is it planned to 2016 as well as cypher 2?

[Angus_FX]

@ KingTuck Testing is under way, yes. First private test builds went out to the test group before Christmas, we'll be sending another out to a slightly wider group in about ten days - I'll be able to post another longer update then with some more audio examples, and additional details of work that's gone in since November. I may have been a little too inspired by Tatsuya Takahashi's wonderful Minilogue walkthrough on YouTube.. couple of new TransMod tricks inspired by that.

@ david.beholder Should be, but likely towards the end of 2016. It's an easier synth to update than Cypher in some ways, but it's branching out in to new paraphonic territory ("all string synths are divide down machines, but not all divide down machines are string synths").

[thetechnobear]

* MIDI Multidimensional Polyphonic Expression, to fully support ROLI Seaboard, Seaboard RISE, Roger Linn Linnstrument, KMI K-Board Pro 4 & Haken Continuum

is this full MPE compliance? or similar to the Strobe 2 (which is pretty good)

in particular, is the per channel pitchbend working? in Strobe 2 this is the most inconvenient part, basically if you move between presets you have to keep setting up per channel pitchbend.
the only way we can do this is to pitch modulation to do this, but cant lock the modulation slots e.g. to make it work across patches.
it would be better if this was just using pitchbend per midi channel... (and allow +/- 48 semitones)

I did reply to your questions on your forum, but never got a reply back... and strobe 2 has not been updated to 'fix' this.

Thanks
Mark
(btw: if you need a beta tester for MPE testing for cypher 2, shoot me a PM )

[Angus_FX]

Mod slot locking is definitely in there (& coming to Strobe2 as well). I'll take another look at per-channel pitchbend independent of the modulation system.

[david.beholder]

Cypher's biggest charm to me were quirkier sounds. I hope all V1 sounds still work, it's a bit hard to tell with the new layout if the feature set is a superset of V1. To me Cypher is an excellent source of squeaky, blippy, slightly-off-center sounds.

The ones are coming from Robert Elster -- all that future funk/syro-before-syro soundnds -- are amazing. Really interested to learn how he did it, but not sure where to look

@ david.beholder Should be, but likely towards the end of 2016. It's an easier synth to update than Cypher in some ways, but it's branching out in to new paraphonic territory ("all string synths are divide down machines, but not all divide down machines are string synths").

This?

Acetone_Top-9_13.jpg