What are the best filters you have heard??

[IIRs]

IIRs...that's awesome. makes me want to play with wires and I've been banned from doing so in 7 states (including my own )

I didn't play with any real wires I'm afraid. Actually, in a manner of speaking I made the beast with Synthedit!



(Well, actually it was made for me by Nick Collier from Pink Grease in return for some custom Synthedit design work I did for him.)

[Mighty Pea]

Well, I don't know about "the best" but my favorite filter is "the beast":

How about some schematics for me to feed to my techier friends? I'd been bugging someone about a pedal that would do something similar (but in a much smaller scope) for a while now, but he says he needs schematics.

[IIRs]

Sorry I can't help you there. Nick might be able to, but I have a sneaking suspicion its not written down in any way and he just sort of fiddles around with these things till they work (or till they start to make an interesting noise anyway!)

All I can tell you is that it uses 6 ECC81 / 12AT7 valves to provide 3 parallel filters: 2 bandpass and one switchable HP / LP. Each band has independant resonance and gain levels plus two cutoff controls which set start and end points for a global sweep control (currently bodged but will ultimately be a foot controller). However, the control system uses some weird optical design, and small amounts of light bleed from one control to another mean that when the global sweep is set hard one way or the other the 2 cutoff controls act sort of like coarse and fine settings.

All 3 filters have different characters: band 1 sounds very 'Leftfield Guiness Advert" in lowpass mode with no resonance, but starts to self-oscilate almost as soon as you move the res control... anything above 9-oclock on that dial screams like a bitch!

Band 2 is a bandpass, but the resonance is almost as evil as band 1... both those bands with full resonance is a bit scary frankly.

And band 3 is another bandpass, but quite a bit more controllable than band 2.. you can get the res knob just past 10-oclock before it turns into an oscilator

Finally the whole arrangement has input and output gain controls, so I can alter the gain structure to control the distortion. Those valves do some wicked things to drums when you crank the input! But I've used it subtly as well, just to warm things up with no obvious distortion.

[rn99]

Anyways, I'd love a super-flexible synth from em too.. with spline envelopes, fully modular etc. A little birdie told me, it's coming.. it's coming.. maybe.

Cheers!
bManic

i read on their own forum the FF guys were working on a new plug - what, when, do tell more!

and thanks for the FFT presets, nice sounds.

Cheers

Paul

[rn99]

another excellent filter is 914 by audio damage...it's a fixed filter bank with 12x band pass filters plus hi and lo pass filters...not teribbly flexible but does what it does very well, i use it a lot.

for an every day filter fx i'd recommend fabfilter volcano