Shortcircuit XT is in Beta!

[Andreya_Autumn]

(Music by Andreya https://softanimalrecords.bandcamp.com/)

We in the Surge Synth Team are happy to finally announce that Shortcircuit XT is ready for Beta.

If you don’t know, Shortcircuit 1 was a creative sampler made by Vember Audio (the same company that made Surge) back in the 2000s.
Shortcircuit XT is, you could say, its spiritual successor.
It’s a sampler plugin, focused on creative sample manipulation with some more standard library playback features also. Besides being a useful sampler, it is also a quite capable synth, due to its extensive modulation and processing features. And like everything the Surge Synth Team does, it’s free and open source.

Incidentally, it’s just about 5 years ago that the Shortcircuit 2 codebase was made open source (thanks Claes). Back then, the team initially had other things to focus on, and it took a while to arrive at a believable plan for the project. About three years back that plan had taken form, Surge XT was thriving, and attention started to shift towards what would become Shortcircuit XT.

And while we’re still not quite “done”, Shortcircuit XT has gotten to be a really fun sampler, it’s already proven its usefulness on actual releases… in short: it’s worth inviting you all to try it out!

Check it out here

As always, questions, feature requests, bug reports, etc etc etc are welcome either here, our Github, or our Discord.

Some notes:
- One of the areas where we’re still behind is documentation, no user manual yet. I'll try to write a little quickstart guide soon to help you get started.
- We won’t ship a factory library as large as Surge’s, but we’re working on a small one, kept in a separate repo lest the SCXT installer grow enormous.
- The factory content repo is here. So far it has the drums/bells/bass from that song above and some more.
- Accessibility features are not done (sorry!), but will be worked on during the beta period.


FAQ:

Q: What's the deal with groups and zones?

A zone is what holds the samples and plays voices.
All the modulation and processing in the zone is polyphonic (per-voice).

A group holds any number of zones.
All the modulation and processing in the group is paraphonic (works on stereo sum from all the zones in the group).

Note that you can't edit zone mapping parameters while in group mode. The reason for that is that allowing this made it harder to keep track of which mode you're in, and very easy to accidentally edit group parameters due to thinking you're in zone mode (or vise versa). To edit groups, go to groups mode, to edit zones go to zone mode. You choose between them with the tabs above the list to the left.

Q: How do I download the factory content?
Press the <>CODE button and select download as zip. That gives you the readme etc which you do not need. But it's still the easiest for now. We'll make this more convenient eventually.

Q: I want my to ignore velocity, how do I do that.
Select the [GROUP] tab, then set the velocity sens slider in the output/routing pane to 0.

Q: What's the diff between .scm and .scp and which should I use.
An .scp (ShortCircuit Part) is a single instrument containing any number of groups and zones.
An instance of Shortcircuit XT can load up to 16 parts (for multi-timbral usage), and a .scm (ShortCircuit Multi) is that whole multi-part state of the instance.

You should save/load Part (.scp) most of the time. But if you've set up an instance with more than one Part and want to save the whole shebang, you'll need to save as Multi (.scm).

Do note the mixer pane including its effects, routing etc is only saved with the Multi. So you may need to save the whole multi even for a single instrument if you want to recall all of the mixer settings with it.

Q: Can I pitch samples without altering their speed/Is there time-stretching?
Not yet. There are good-sounding open-source time-stretching algorithms nowadays, but implementing one is still a bunch of work and we decided its best to postpone until after a 1.0 release.

Q: Can I send a non-keytracking sample into a keytracking resonator/processor?
No, but soon! It should be doable with the mod matrix by assigning negative keytrack to sample tuning, but the sample tune mod target is misnamed, miscategorized, and has strange scaling on it that makes this not work. We will fix that soon.

Q: Can it sample?
No. It's a sample player or sample-initiated synth, not a sample recorder.

Q: Can it do sample chopping/slicing?
Yes, sorta. But it's not its strongest suit. The way you'd do it is load the same sample into multiple zones each one-key-wide, then set the start/end points differently for each one. If your sample has embedded slice points in it, that will help with setup. But if you're used to MPC-style samplers or specialized beat slicing plugins etc etc, this will probably feel a bit awkward. We may revisit this after 1.0.

Q: Will SCXT support custom skins?
Skins no, but themes yes. We don't yet have a user-facing theme editor in the UI as of now (though we've planned for the possibility of adding one eventually) but you can already play with theming by saving a theme from the top-right menu, editing the colors in the JSON then loading it.


We hope you'll enjoy using it as much as we are.
All the best.
// Surge Synth Team

[sinkmusic]

Congratulationson the release, and thank you all the team for the work !

[hey212]

WOOT!!!

[stefancrs]

Yay!! I was just looking at the old thread today because I was curious as to where this was going.

Back in the days I used to write reviews for the Swedish magazine Studio, and I gave Shortcurcuit a much higher grade than Kontakt, which caused a bit of a commotion

[Andreya_Autumn]

Ha! Det kan jag tänka mig...

SCXT is quite different from SC1(and from Kontakt for that matter). We hope that people who enjoyed the original will find this one likeable also.

[stefancrs]

Yeah there was some issues relating to my review of kontakt and their upcoming full-page ad iirc...

[audiojunkie]

Yay!!!

[ElVincente]

Awesome! Thanks so much for all your work surge team!!!

[Grenoybel]

Congrats! Love this sampler.

[Andreya_Autumn]

Oh, forgot to link the factory content repo. It still only has the bell patch in it that you hear in that tune. But more is coming. Added to the original post.

[baconpaul]

fun shipping this with you Andreya (and Evil and the rest of the team). And great track too! (And also commenting since I don't know how to get a KVR thread in the 'my threads' view without adding a comment. LOL).

Hope you all have fun with the instrument folks!

[bagpipe200]

Excellent - look forward to trying it out.

[whassup]

Great video!

Thanx a ton!

Long anticipated.

[Cuauhtli]

Sweeeeet. Been waiting for this.

[Shabdahbriah]

Nice. Looks great! Nice track in that video.