Delay with gate?

[adamszabo]

I think you should be able to to do this with FL Studio, if you assign an envelope controller to the delay level and you can control the delay with specific notes. So you get the delay with only some notes.

[MichaelBenjamin]

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[tulamide]

I think you should be able to to do this with FL Studio, if you assign an envelope controller to the delay level and you can control the delay with specific notes. So you get the delay with only some notes.

I don't use FL Studio, but the same principle should be doable with other DAWs as well. However, I don't understand why their is no built-in "sidechain" in Delay effects for that kind of editing. It takes away so much of the manual burden and would allow for a much more musical approach.

I researched on the internet and I found one free delay effect with integrated ducking and gating (that I won't use, because it is 32-bit only and version alpha 0.10 ...) and two commercial plugins with a rythmic editor that could do the trick at least in some way, But those are priced well above $150! I could buy Serum or Pigments2 for that price.

So there's your plugin idea. If you ever want to create a delay effect for musicians, consider accepting midi control to exempt specific parts of the audio-in stream from the delay-line, but let all the other audio run through the feedback line.

@Spogg
Yes, it is a matter of minutes to build a midi filter with Ruby that outputs 1 or 0 (or whatever else datatype needed), but that doesn't build the delay itself. I won't take a year off to build it myself, I rather hoped it already exists. Did you create a delay effect with sync to host feature? If so, how much effort would it be to include the new functionality, given the filter exists and provides 1/0?

[Spogg]

@tulamide
Here’s a proof of concept, or rather my interpretation of your concept.

I made a simple echo delay with the option to sync to host (or run free) and a key controlled system that optionally only routes the audio through the delay when you press the note you select for responding to.
I haven’t tried it as a plugin in a DAW, but it works fine in FS.

Let me know if it’s any use to you etc.

[adamszabo]

I guess the simplest way to do this is to duplicate your synth, and route one to a dry FX and the other one to one with the delay. Then you can play some notes with the dry one, and only make specific notes to the wet delayed instance.

[tulamide]

I guess the simplest way to do this is to duplicate your synth, and route one to a dry FX and the other one to one with the delay. Then you can play some notes with the dry one, and only make specific notes to the wet delayed instance.

I agree, that's the simplest manual way. But it also is a very technical and less musical way.

[tulamide]

@tulamide
Here’s a proof of concept, or rather my interpretation of your concept.

I made a simple echo delay with the option to sync to host (or run free) and a key controlled system that optionally only routes the audio through the delay when you press the note you select for responding to.
I haven’t tried it as a plugin in a DAW, but it works fine in FS.

Let me know if it’s any use to you etc.

Almost there! It made me play for half an hour, before I realized that I should actually test it.
I also found out in the meantime, that the term we are looking for (you know, that Kontakt thingy) is "key switches". Studio One just released version 5 and features seperate midi parts for key switches, so that you can work on your melodies, chords, whatever, without ever needing to think about not touching the key switches. GREAT!

The recording below plays the original, followed by boring standard "just delay everything" and finally a key-switched delay. It's rough and dirty, but you explicitly said it's just a proof of concept. And I already love it!

My wishlist
- Two sliders for wet and dry signal amounts (so that it can be used as a send effect)
- Three states for the key-switch: Ignore key-switch, pass on key switch, block on key switch (if you have just 10% you do NOT want to pass through, it's easier to set a note and have it block that part)
- More influence on the attack of the gate opening/closing (you can hear in the recording that it is quite rough)
- More influence over left/right movements, maybe having individual settings per channel, in addition to the current ones
- more options to tone the feedback, not just damp, but also types of distortion, filtering and LFO'd amplification

Last but not least. There seems to be an inconsistency, but I can't say what it is. It sounds almost as if one key-switch-note wasn't registered in the last repetition of the third part of the recording.

If you are at one point out of ideas, it would be SO great if you considered making this musician's dream of a delay effect!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/8kqf66ti14tgj8z/key-switch-delay.mp3?dl=0

[Spogg]

@tulamide
I’m glad it’s at least going in the right direction!

I’m really busy with my own stuff at the moment but I will attend to your requests. I’ll probably make one or two changes at a time and you can test and give feedback as it progresses.

The missing gate thing is worrying but I think may be due to using green so much. If your control note is very short it might get missed or behave unreliably in green.
I imagined you would re-create the green in Ruby to give more accurate timing, but that can be in the future.

Is the sync working as you would expect and want? As you know, it’s a weak area for me and I never made a sync system for a delay before.

[Spogg]

Well I couldn’t resist spending the morning on this, so I’ve attached the latest iteration.

I think I’ve incorporated much of what you requested but you’ll need to read the change log and check it out because I have quite likely not understood everything.
I’m not sure about the Left/Right routing but I’ve given the option of inverting the phase of each channel in the feedback path.
And I haven’t put in an LFO yet because I’m not certain about what it should do and where in the signal path it should operate.

Give it whirl and let me know what’s next…

[tulamide]

I didn't expect it at all! But I love it. Yesterday I was too much into using it as a plugin in my DAW, so I didn't even have a quick look at the schematic. Sorry for that. Here's the Ruby code (at least, so far as I understood what you wanted me to do). In contrast to the green solution it doesn't get into oblivion when changing the key while already playing with the keyswitch being true (It will immedately switch to false and await a new key press). But you would need to connect the Ruby output to the correct place.

There's something strange going on with the new additions. Set dry completely off to better unerstand it. Then set high values for everything (drive amount max, some assymmetry value, bass and treble to +9 dB or something). You will recognize that even on rather low feedback settings (I set it to less than halfway clockwise), it immediately wents into infinite feedback with certain notes being played. While this sounds fascinating at times, it isn't what it should do. My guess is that the feedback amplifier doesn't react to the now much more amplified signal, so that it gets to 0 dBFS or even more? If that is too complicated to deal with, let's remove these functionalities.

I also thought about the user guidance, and I really want to change a few things. The three options we have for the keyswitch should be more clearly shown to the user. The first setting (that you called "ignore") will become a visual bypass switch for the keyswitch module. Much like you did on the volume module. The other two options should stand out more prominent with their naming. I really want it to be like "pass" and "block" mode, or "add" and "cut" mode. I'm not sure what the best way of describing it is. Just not the current ones.

Regarding the delay options, that came from my testing in the DAW. I now had a look at the schematic and it seems there is only one delay line. I thought it would have one line for the left channel and one for the right channel, so that we could have set the left channel to, for example, a dotted 8th and the right channel to a straight 16th. But it seems the stereo-like effect is done just by crossfeeding back and forth?

EDIT: Damn, I left the example synth in the schematic. Sorry!