More Chicken Heads and Quad Sync!

[Spogg]

I’ve been away for a few days so I’m late trying this one.

The presets sound really impressive and the look is great, as always!

You are an inspiration to us all Kevin. Thank you!

Spogg

[k brown]

Thank you kind sir - and especially thanks for the goodies I plundered from your projects to get this thing to do what it's supposta'

Currently working on presets for a project that answers the question: "What would it have looked like if back in the early 70's Pultec decided to make a synthesizer?"

Super 35 copy.jpg (143.14 KiB) Viewed 15343 times

Based on the NI Super 8, but with some added features and swaps the built-in effects for a see-it-all 14-slot 'patch bay' instead of a single, tiny mod routing window.

For those not familiar with the Super 8, it's two oscillators have four mixable waveforms that are re-shapeable and the shapes modulatable. Sort of a mix of features from a couple of different early Rolands. Weird thing is, just so they could give it the cute name, it only has 8-note polyphony. Well, I obviously didn't copy that bit, so in keeping with the cine-format naming - mine's called Super 35 (a 35mm film format), and has 35-note poly. Plus it was a perfect candidate for the Pultec-inspired GUI because personally I think Super 8's GUI looks like a plastic kiddie toy (like those little CasioTone things from the '80s).

native-instruments-super-8-01 copy.jpg (55.1 KiB) Viewed 15343 times

[k brown]

With about a dozen presets (such as they are - I'm no patch-meister )
10

Super 35.fsm

(5.55 MiB) Downloaded 1004 times

A couple of things I added that I think Super 8 missed the boat on:
1) The Shape controls had no effect on Noise (?!) - so I've made the Shape control take it from Pink to White to Purple.
2) The Sub pulse width was narrow > square > narrow; I thought it was more useful to make the Shape control take the square to narrow pulse when turned CW, but turned CCW, it filters the square down to more like a soft Tri - a very useful option for a sub-osc.
3) Gave P-Bend the option of affecting Osc2 only, for when sync is used.
4) When the LFOs were in free run mode, their Phase knobs lost their labels and just sat there doing nothing; to me, just begging to switch to Delay controls.

[martinvicanek]

Hey Kevin, cool stuff!
Great sounds, awesome look! Why don't you throw in a reverb?

[k brown]

I just didn't want to have anything 'hidden' (also something stressed on Super 8), and without doing that, there's no GUI space for one. Just open up SpaceOhRack with it and you have Korus, MVerb and Spogg's mutiDelay in one tidy package !

I did consider doing the EGs with sliders, which would open up space for an effect; maybe I still will. I do really like using SpaceOhRack as a go-to FX pack for any synth.

- - Now I think about it, since the whole vibe of Super 8 was to recall a couple of Roland early polys, maybe makes more sense to add a chorus, like most of the Roland's had. Korus has very distinctive sound - I'm thinking MV's QuadChorus might have a more vintage-y sound. Then, when used with SpaceOhRack, one would have a choice between two kinds of chorus.

Thoughts anyone?

[k brown]

Trying to post version with slider EGs and QuadChorus, but getting mssg: "forum attachment quota has been reached." ?

[Spogg]

Trying to post version with slider EGs and QuadChorus, but getting mssg: "forum attachment quota has been reached." ?

I’ve had this a couple of times and you need to email Malc to change your quota:

malc@dsprobotics.com

He’s not good at replying so you may need to try several times. We moderators can’t do it because it’s an admin privilege only. In the meantime you’ll have to supply a file-sharing link, which is a pain for everyone.

Just had a quick play with the Super 35 and really like the presets, but no time to dig deeper at the moment.

Cheers

Spogg

[trogluddite]

Unfortunately, I have to report that I'm having a bit of trouble with Super-35. There's a problem somewhere in the modulation matrix, so that assigning LFO2 or the envelopes doesn't work or only works intermittently - I even managed to get different notes playing back with different modulation amounts simultaneously. I found that there were quite a few bits of the schematic which were showing the black "don't know what kind" stream connectors, so I suspect that it's probably the mod-matrix bus not connecting because it can't match the data types at each end.

A shame that - the multiple oscillator sources in combination with "shape" on all of them makes some very lush waveforms. Hopefully, just going through and forcing a few connector types will get it fixed up - I had a quick go, with not much success, but I probably just wasn't thorough enough (or it needed more save/reloads for some reason).

And; yes - it is way easier on the eye than its "Fisher-Price" inspiration!

[k brown]

Wow - I don't know what to do about this. Since it isn't happening on my machine (an old Lenovo ThinkPad) I don't know how to diagnose. I've seen those 'dotted' connections before, but I'm not getting them with this schem, and they never occurred during construction so I don't even know what to suspect. Is it possibly to do with too many mod matrix slots?

One thing I might try is 'hard-wiring' the EGs and LFOs to the matrix; I've had the experience before of wireless connections to a mod matrix not actually sending any data - they 'lit up' but didn't actually work. I was actually surprised that I didn't have to do that on this one. I've never had it happen on LFOs though only envelopes.

[trogluddite]

Wow - I don't know what to do about this. Since it isn't happening on my machine

Those Ruby errors in the filters are much the same, it seems. I think it must be something to do with a "whole schematic recompile" when I do my usual quick edit to switch from DS to ASIO outputs. I just tried the download again, and if I use the schematic as uploaded, it seems to be fine. It's only when I make that edit and save again that the problems pop up.

I'm in the habit these days of always explicitly setting my connectors to a data type unless I really do want them to be templates. The auto-detection always has been a bit flakey, especially wherever busses are involved, so I don't chance it any more.