One Synth Challenge #151: GR-8 by Phuturetone (Jasinski wins!)

[photonic]

Just checking this new synth. Looks promising, although is has no velocity?
But there is a problem with the distortion in the FX. Whenever I use the position SATUR, I got no sound! All other positions in distortion are ok. I use Reaper v5.99.
Anyone else having the same problem.

[SeBaer]

Just checking this new synth. Looks promising, although is has no velocity?
But there is a problem with the distortion in the FX. Whenever I use the position SATUR, I got no sound! All other positions in distortion are ok. I use Reaper v5.99.
Anyone else having the same problem.

Do you use the latest version? There were reports of earlier version having problems with certain distortion algorithms. But I thought those would have been ironed out...

[Taron]

This is one phat sounding synth! I feel a bit like a traitor, trying it with Ableton (vst3 no problem), but other than that... nice. Velocity is a sad missing ingredient, but even that just suggests what sort of stuff you'd want to do with it.
Very promising!

[TheFrozenSea]

Looking forward to this one! I skipped the last challenge since I encountered Cubase crashes, switched to Reaper (with a bit of a learning curve), focused too heavily on sound design and then lost all motivation when I realized the actual song ideas I had kinda sucked.

Learning from my mistakes now. Starting in Reaper, just setting up very basic sounds and focus on the songwriting from day 1. I was tempted to try another serialism-inspired piece but decided I'll probably spare y'all and write something more conventional

Talking for myself, I'd love to hear some serial weirdness...
Hope I can join in this month.

Hehe that's good to hear I'll be returning to those concepts for sure, maybe as early as the next OSC. But for this one I seem to be writing some sort of brass-heavy waltz in D-phrygian. I guess that passes as conventional

[radd]

My experience with loading/saving presets so far:
.......
Hope this helps...

Thank you, you actually guided me to a successful installation.
For those who still struggle, it's just a matter of write rights inside: /Users/{name}/Library/Audio/Presets/Phuturetone/GR-8

[photonic]

Just checking this new synth. Looks promising, although is has no velocity?
But there is a problem with the distortion in the FX. Whenever I use the position SATUR, I got no sound! All other positions in distortion are ok. I use Reaper v5.99.
Anyone else having the same problem.

Do you use the latest version? There were reports of earlier version having problems with certain distortion algorithms. But I thought those would have been ironed out...

Thanx! That was a good hint. Now it works.

[3lu5iv3]

Does anyone know where to check the version number?
can't find it.

[hockinsk3]

Version number is in the installer properties or the most recent entry in the changelog.txt shows it. Latest is v1.0.7 I believe.

[Aro]

I'm not sure about how I feel about the sound of this synth. I'm thinking about sitting this month out and focus on my favs, like Absynth and Surge. I have something in mind I'd like to compose, but I don't think GR-8 has the right sound for it. I might play around with it a little longer and see what comes.

[hockinsk3]

Loving the synth, but i'm finding the user preset management a bit painful though. First play I was just creating some Kicks, but there's no way to categorise them as Drums, you have 'User' and as in previous posts above, no folder hierarchy seems to work, it has to be within the factory presets folder. Then the DAW also picks up duplicated because if you want to scroll through the presets in the plugin, it doesn't pick up both locations. Weird.

[briefcasemanx]

Yeah presets are a PITA.

Just categorize them the old school way with text before the preset name, like "DR - bass drum thump" , "BA - Moog Glide" etc

[] Peter:H []

Preview only: That's a good start. Probably this is gonna be another track in the dystopia series: https://soundcloud.com/p-e-t-e-r-h/bunk ... GgXNOSLK9p

I have btw finished my protoplug notes filter and published it to github: https://github.com/huberp/ProtoplugScri ... toplug.lua. It now is way better implemented and works with a "parameter" that let's you select which note of all octaves should pass through.

[briefcasemanx]

I spent half the day yesterday designing drumkit sounds and now it's hard to get a bass sound to fit in for some reason. Finding drums are harder to do in this synth than some others like noisemaker (I think because of lack of semitone pitch adjustment on one of the oscillators and lack of sine wave on the other). I got a somewhat convincing tom sound though (after lots of compression and eq).

My experience with loading/saving presets so far:

The saving and managing of the presets is a bit strange (not to say unsatisfying). I'm using the AU version in Logic Pro X on macOS. The factory presets are all there and when I save a preset (directly from the plugin) it will automatically be categorized as a "user" preset, though it is stored in the same folder as the factory presets.

The default preset folder is here: (user)/Library/Audio/Presets/Phuturetone/GR-8

But there are some things which I find a bit annoying:

1) The newly saved presets do not appear in the other GR-8 instances which have already been loaded. You have to create a new track or reload the plugin on an existing track to see all the (newly) saved user presets.

2) You cannot organize the presets into subfolders. The plugin only "sees" them, when they are on the top level within the presets folder. So the "categories" are only shown inside the plugin, but cannot be represented in a folder structure.

3) The presets are stored in the .aupreset format and so they appear in the Logic Library (which is very convenient!), but are not subdivided into categories, since all presets are stored in the same folder. (Sorting the factory presets into subfolders manually doesn't work - see point 2.)

What I have done:

Actually on macOS the factory presets should be in the main Library folder and not the user Library folder, so I moved them to "/Library/Audio/Presets/Phuturetone/GR-8"

Now in the Logic Library the factory presets appear separately in a subfolder named "Factory" (as they should) and can now be distinguished from the self-made user presets (which are stored under user/Library/Audio/Presets/Phuturetone/GR-8). I've also sorted the factory presets manually into corresponding subfolders, so the categories are shown now in the Logic Library.

The drawback of this: The presets will not be shown inside the plugin anymore and can only be accessed via the Logic Library. But since it now integrates much better with the typical workflow of Logic, I will stick with it.

Hope this helps...

Very cool, I'll have to check what the preset format is in windows.

[Orboscope]

This synths sounds absolutly fantastic but seems pretty much unusable on my system or atleast in FL studio. Three instances and I already have crazy lag. Does any other FL studio user expirience this?

[hockinsk3]

It's a bit of a cpu & memory hog and likes to crash when saving patches for some reason. I disabled all the effects on the factory presets with a search and replace which helps a fair bit.

Reverb: 1358819125
Chorus: 1012248993
Distortion: 498895199
Delay: 1072946944
Phaser: 575720912
Eq: 950034005

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