But there are constraints about the implementation if your goal is to emulate specific analog setups.Ah_Dziz wrote: Mon Sep 08, 2025 1:14 amThese are all good points about analog hardware. Not so much about software models of analog hardware. There's no constraints here about parameter ranges or available ICs or cost of adding knobs (they've already made a clunky second parameter area). These are pretty good sounding models but they have (for me) badly tuned parameter (or needlessly limited) ranges and other parameters that aren't adjustable at all. Adjusting the available headroom in each circuit would be a simple to implement tweak that would yield massively different sounds.kraster wrote: Sun Sep 07, 2025 5:49 amAh_Dziz wrote: Sat Sep 06, 2025 11:38 pm I'd love to see far more flexibility if they wanted to lean on the "analog circuitry" angle. Adjustable supply voltage and signal voltage as well as the feedback resistance and filter capacitance. Being able to trigger the modules with arbitrary audio would also be cool. If they wanted to go so in depth with the models they could have made each voice a similar "circuit" that we could mess with and supplied presets for different sounds. Unfortunately, as it is it's pretty much more useful as an expensive generator of analog style drum samples.
Just like analog drum machines don't use the same circuit topology for different drum sounds the whole idea with Tekno is having various bespoke analogue models tuned to specific tasks.
The 808 had different synthesis types depending on the drum type. Pulse into resonator for the kicks and Toms, twin oscillators plus noise source for the snare, inharmonic square waves for the hats, twin square waves for cowbell, noise burst plus multiple envelopes for handclaps .
Each of these had specifically tuned filters, envelopes, impulse responses, oscillators etc.
That's what Tekno is leaning into in terms of analog modelling. It's not an open ended system because analog drum machines themselves are very specifically tuned to produce their results.
A lot of the engines DO have things like feedback resistance, capacitance and voltage amounts. Pulse Scale is effectively a voltage setting. A lot of the feedback controls have resistance values. But there's only so much you can expose to the user before the use case falls apart.
The problem with having too open ended a design within this approach is that a lot of the component value ranges are sweet spot ranges just like in the real drum machines and anything outside of that becomes useless for the purpose.
You'll note in Tekno that the ranges of the parameters you can alter are very narrow for that reason.
In other words it's as flexible as is practicable.
I think Microtonic is great as a one size fits all style drum synthesiser but there's definitely space for a different approach that's more rooted in classic techniques that models the per sound particulars.
Synths like Battalion or Microtonic use more generic engines that are designed to be used in a much broader way.
Tekno's models are much more tightly built around very specific hardware circuit configurations. As I said within those constraints there isn't a huge amount of useful values given the purpose.
The kicks for example are built around being kick drums and not generic things that can be twisted into anything. Between the two kick models there's a massive range available but they all fall within the "analog drum machine" idea of a kick drum.
That restricts the available parameters to serving that purpose. But you have essenitally 16 different models (the two toms and two congas are the same but with different pitch ranges) with which to get whatever sounds you're looking for. There is a massive amount of variety within that.
Arbitrarily extending parameters outside of that kind of breaks the intent of the plugin.
Like the 808 kick example above things like the characteristic pitch slide aren't directly addressable in some engines because they (like the 808) are an emergent property of how the circuit behaves. It's only later that digital interpretations approximated this behaviour by doing a pitch slide with an envelope.
To me the appeal of Tekno is that the whole approach eschews those kinds of digital shortcuts and goes back to those circuits designs and their weird behaviours as the basis for sound creation.
