One Synth Challenge #126: Bazz::Murda by DistoCore (MrKarolus is the winner!)

[z.prime]

Yes I would like to vote, too
I hope I can do this, will check it.

You should be fine to vote. The criteria is:

If you did NOT participate, you may vote, as long as you have more than 40 KVR forum posts prior to the competition start.

I would say that since you provided the synth, that sure seems like participation to me.

[RichardSemper]

Yes I would like to vote, too
I hope I can do this, will check it.

Thanks.

You are of course very welcome to vote!
Many thanks for your participation and active involvement in the challenge.

[doctorbob]

Wow! Great tracks everyone. So many great sounds. I reckon @distocore should gather up as many as possible - show Bazz:murda off very well! I suspect there's much more variety than expected

All I can say is and I have given out more 5's than ever before - variety and competence across the whole gamut of objective and subjective value judgements leads me there!

Really a glorious round - and to be honest, I did not expect this. You all pulled out all the stops.

So ... ***** DoctorBob has voted ****

dB

[exponent1]

Voted! Very diverse set of quality tracks, as we've come to expect from the OSCers. Well done everyone

I really liked this synth, with some more feature updates as @ontrackp mentioned, this will be a go-to synth for many of us!

[DistoCore]

Voted!
I have given many tracks 5 or 4 points, there are just a lot of very good tunes
Once again many thanks for this great round, nice complements on Bazz::Murda and improvement suggestions
I keep my fingers crossed for all of you and wish you a relaxed weekend

Good luck!

[Auplant]

[jasinski]

Me votes be in maties.

[FrankH]

Voted

I enjoyed listening to all the tracks. I agree with Bob, this is not how I expected this OSC to play out. Thanks to Distocore, for participating. I learned a few things, I now know what Gabber is.

[InnerSynk]

My votes are in. Over all everyone did a great job. Really impressed with the quality of the tracks. Nice work everyone!

[rockingricky]

V-O-T-E-D

As expected this synth is promoting the "Heavy stuff"
but I tried to ignore my personal music preferences
and I hope I judged in the right way one's composition, mix and sound design (which is the most important part of the OSC in my opinion)

Good luck to all and thanks for the comments on my track

[DistoCore]

Because of such a large number of really good tunes
I decided to add some money to the prize pool:

1) 30 EURO
2) 20 EURO
3) 10 EURO

PS: The longer I listen to your tracks, the more I discover new, very interesting and cool sounding sequences and elements
Great job! Thanks and good luck to all of you

[doctorbob]

@distocore - many thanks, very generous and thanks for supporting this challenge.

I'm sure 3 of the many in my top 5 group will be very happy to get this "extra prize"! As you say many really good, varied and interesting tracks this round.

dB

[Inversion Of Control]

Voted, good job everyone!
And thanks to Distocore for this interesting synth, hope you will actively improve it with some new features.

[Carl_saved]

Thanks for the extra prices, @distocore! Thanks for sticking around with this bunch of nerds


Now as I figure out the votes (which is tough as always) I'd like to give some detailed feedback from my point of view on Bazz::Murda. It will be a long message
First of all, there's a ton of good stuff to say about the synth:

I find it interesting that, although it is a kick and bass synth, the sound engine is kept very flexible to cover polyphony and a whole lot of features which I would not have guessed in a bass synth. The things I enjoyed about Bazz::Murda are

• The oscillators. They sound good, have a very useful selection of waveforms, that doesn't overwhelm but provides a lot of useful stuff. We used many of the "non-trivial" waveforms. Also the controls inside an oscillator section are very good
• The FM knob at the bottom provides some very welcome possibility to change the timbre of a patch that has already been dialed in, but doesn't overwhelm with a whole FM engine full of possibilities. Also the AM modulator section is very handy for creating anharmonic sounds. Simple controls but very effective!
• The internal EQ and output filters are nice to have, because an often much needed EQ correction can be built directly into a synth patch. (However - can they be deactivated individually for CPU purposes?)
• Also a bit crusher/sample redux inside the synth engine is rare (and of course can be easily done with external effects) - but again, these effects can be built into a patch directly, without having to fear about violating OSC rules
• Distortion module is very nice - although I used it very sparingly. Fortunately, some of you fellow OSCers used it appropriately
• Also the click parameter is a nice addon and can make kick design a quicker process.
• The time parameters at the envelopes. Makes editing quicker and more comfortable in some cases.

In my opinion, Bazz::Murda is not designed to be a workhorse synth, and it isn't a workhorse synth. Simply because of CPU efficiency. I expect from my workhorse synth that 6-7 instances played simultaneously don't eat up 50% of my CPU. Bazz::Murda is a utility synth and a project can bear a few of 'em without drowning in CPU issues, but not a ton of them. (Ok, maybe I am the wrong person to moan about this )
I'd like to address a couple of things I have come across while working with Bazz::Murda:

• Bazz::Murda seems to drop quite a lot of MIDI messages. When I programmed pitchbend jumps, it sometimes skipped these jumps. E.g. when I have a pitchbend ramp for some note that jumps back to zero after that note, it could happen that the synth was out of tune afterwards. I worked around this by artificially generating a couple of MIDI pitchbend messages close to zero after such a jump so it would be very unlikely to drop all of them.
• Parameter modulation from the host sometimes wasn't smooth. I noticed that especially when we abused the OSC pitch knobs to emulate pitchbend with more than two semitones range.
• The synth behaviour at saving/loading projects is decieving when it comes to LFO rates (and maybe delay time ... I'm not so sure). When I haven't deactivated LFO sync, I still can dial in a non-synced value for the LFO rate -- until I reload the project! Then the value I dialed in previously is destroyed and replaced by the sync knob time. I would try to make this behaviour clear from a preset editing point of view: simply deactivate the LFO rate knob when sync is active.
• The pitch envelope may be hardcore kick specific and therefore not be a conventional ADSR. But it still badly needs a setting where the attack phase doesn't exist (i.e. the phase where the pitch rises). Because the rise phase is very short, it is hardly noticeable when playing deep notes (like for a hardcore kick). But when playing high notes it is more penetrant.
• The user interface is very big. Both Josias and I weren't able to access all the controls. Luckily we only missed out on the sample rate bar and the Scope page, so we could still use the synth in all of its glory.
• And then the issues which already have been addressed: the instability issue related to audio buffer size, and the highpass filter clicking.

Overall, Bazz::Murda can do most the bread and butter synth sounds you would expect. It is great for distorted kicks and basses - obviously And it turned out that the synth is surprisingly good for pads as I have heard many good pads during this round. And it is good for cymbals

P.S. I tried to spare out feature requests for now

[BlitBit]

I have voted. Thanks to everyone who has commented on my track so far! It will try to comment on some of the tracks in the next days as well.

Thanks for the extra prices @distocore!