randy's Recent Posts
This year it seems desirable and possible for Madrona Labs to make a Soundplane to CV device. This would be primarily a Eurorack module, but the circuit could also be built into its own enclosure for use with vintage synths etc.
Normally I do most of my design work in private, and only announce a product when it's pretty much done. But we (Brian and I) are going to change it up this time. Because neither of us is that deeply into the Eurorack world, it makes sense to solicit input early on in the process this time. This is going to be a utility device (though hopefully an elegant one) — so before we get too far along, let's make sure it will be useful to you!
The basic idea
USB jack for powering the Soundplane. Module puts out CV / gates / mod outputs for individual touches. Like the Soundplane app, a zone map decides how the Soundplane surface is divided up into notes and what those notes are. You can switch between zone maps, and the name of the current one should be displayed somehow. Aside from this, visual feedback will be at least an LED per Z value. To keep costs low, probably nothing too graphical or fancy.
We're looking for input on things like:
How many voices?
Each voice of touch output will probably have 4 outputs for pitch, x, y and z. Setting up many voices on a modular is not the way most people use them, so I'm guessing that two voices of output will take care of 90% of what people want. We would probably add an expander module for more voices.
Any interesting modes?
A switch that changes z (pressure) into a strict on/off gate might be useful. Any other things like this?
Layout?
individual voice groups vertical or horizontal? voice outputs at bottom or top? I'm thinking top, because a USB jack on the bottom will go to the Soundplane.
Power?
The module will need roughly 250mA at 5v to power the Soundplane. Brian will correct me if I'm wrong. Then there's whatever computing and display the module needs to do, and the outputs. Do we need our own power supply, or a list of compatible Euro power supplies that we can point people to? Any choices in connectivity to make here?
Finally, we're still looking for a great name…
Wow! Great sounds. I'm happy to signal boost your efforts when you want to make them available- please shoot me an email to discuss if you like.
The Input module is getting a lot of love in the update after this one, thanks for the report.
I hear you on input dial for Pulses center. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I'm planning to add an LFO, which would help with at least use case 2.
May i be so bold as to ask for an additional option? One which resizes the partial count.
Absolutely. But this is not going to happen soon or maybe at all. To make a long story short, lots of optimizations depend on the number of partials being fixed when the code is compiled. This would be a huge change. My goal is still significantly less CPU use with 64 partials, so hopefully that will help.
To digress, i'd also like to submit for consideration a Modulus Time output on the KEY module. This would have Time periodically reset, like a basic ramp LFO.
I'm planning to add more LFOs in general for 1.0. Reset on note-on would be a good option for these, getting you effectively the same thing. I'll put it on the list...
Thanks for the question. I'd love to make the module as well as more Soundplanes but I have to be straightforward with you and say there's nothing like a timeline at present.
Spending the hours that Brian and I did on the module was not a smart business decision at the time. A fun and cool project - but with a maximum potential customer base of 90! (That's how many Soundplanes we made.) I've learned a lot more since then about what projects make sense financially and can help me grow the company. It's still a goal to hire just a little more help, and then make more Soundplanes and the module. But I guess you see how there are too many dots to connect between here and there for me to say, or even to know anything more.
Meanwhile, I have a monome norns here and I'm interested in making it work with my Soundplane. A Norns shield could become a pretty cost-effective way to get Soundplane -> CV. Of course I'll post news on that here when I have any.
Good point! Thanks for the feedback.
Heard, this will be fixed in the next update very soon.
Hi, sorry this is not clear right now—those features are not yet implemented but will be for 1.0. More info at the FAQ here: https://madronalabs.com/topics/9274-sumu-update-faq
Hi, this is the first I've heard of bouncing issues in FL Studio. I will see if I can reproduce this on my Macbook Air. I have heard issues of bouncing slowness in other DAWs.
Maybe, there's a workaround in FL studio where you can mix down tracks in real time instead of an offline bounce? But in any case I'll try to fix this ASAP.
All with version 2 coming ASAP, hopefully later this year.
Hi, I'll be working on it later this year after Sumu 1.0 ships.
The search function is under Resources / Support. Maybe we should add a link from the Forums homepage.
No, for real. Enjoy. Feel free to post your getting started questions here, or as always email us at support@madronalabs.com. And thanks in advance for your patience while we handle a larger than usual volume of support emails.
Good feedback, thank you very much.
First, sorry to hear you had some work erased due to the weird UI—if it's any consolation that happened to me a bunch. By popular demand I've replaced it with a popup as default, which will give you one more click to go "whoa, hey!" You could still erase your current patch by clicking on the left or right brackets (or scrolling) but I plan to add a dialog if you have unsaved changes.
The two Gates inputs are identical. It's just an opportunity to have two inputs scaled differently, which I was finding I needed a lot.
The lopass is obvious on some patches and not on others. What's happening is that the release time for each partial depends on its frequency, when it's turned on. But depending on the partial freqs., you might not hear much.
It's not yet out. I'm working on a final issue I need to fix so I can ship Early Access 3.
Wow, I had to read the title a few times to make sure it was Aalto and not Sumu. Aalto is mature and stable, and I haven't heard about audio dropouts in years. Sorry it's not working smoothly.
Does it happen only on specific patches and not on the factory patches? If so please send me one of the patches, so I can try to reproduce this. Via email to support@madronalabs is best please.
Hi, Sumu will get a lot more optimized. Even the next Early Access release that I'm working to get out right now should be noticeably better. If it's not usable for you, please check back later.
Randy is it possible at some point to add a "settings/patch randomizer and mutater" feature.
Parameter locking and randomizing are two things people have asked for multiple times, I'll see about adding them after 1.0.
I'm working to finish Early Access 3 right now. 1.0 will be out later this summer.
I think it's several issues that can come up that may stop audio. I have fixed some things, so chances are good it will be better for you in the next release.
of course!
I get this a lot! Thanks for the encouragement.
That's good to hear. I think the "no sound" bug may be multiple issues. I have some things to fix for the next release coming soon.
Yeah this should be straightforward. Thanks for the good words!
I tried very hard to reproduce this consistently and it's not happening. A single time, the sound engine locked up and the output scope was high as shown in the previous picture. I was all excited to dive in and fix but I can't get it to happen again.
Please, send any steps that lead to the issue consistently.
Also, if you are running into the problem, try making a brand new Sumu in a new Ableton project with the latest beta. Try saving and reloading. Can you get this to freeze? I'm thinking maybe, it was an old set of parameters in Ableton with a newer plugin version that's causing it.
When there is no sound does the output scope freeze like this?
I can add this to Vutu sooner!
I fixed the partials display and the crash. FYI VCV Rack still has other UI and display issues with Sumu.
Sumu is an additive instrument that I've had in the works for a long time. Now that it's nearing completion and heading towards a public beta soon I'm going to break with the way I normally do things and put some detailed info out ahead of its release.
Sumu is another semi-modular instrument. It shares the general appearance of its patcher-in-the-center design with Aalto, Kaivo and Virta. As you can see, it's on the more complex end of the spectrum like Kaivo. Everything is visible at once and there are no tabs or menu pages to navigate, which suits the way I like to program a synthesizer tweaking a little something here, a little something there.
In the same way that Kaivo brought two different and compatible kinds of synthesis together, combining granular synthesis with physical modeling, Sumu combines advanced additive synthesis with FM synthesis.
What's most different about Sumu compared to my other synths is that the signals in the patcher are not just one channel of data, but 64—one for each partial in a sound! By keeping all these channels of data independent and still using the same patching interface, Sumu offers a very usable entry point into additive synthesis, and a range of musical possibilities that have only been approachable with high-end or academic tools or just coding everything yourself... until now.
Each of Sumu's oscillators is the simplest possible kind of FM:a single carrier+modulator pair. And the modulator can produce a variable amount of noise, which like the modulation ratio and depth can be controlled individually per oscillator. In a single voice there are 64 such pairs. Obviously a lot of sounds are possible with this setup—in fact, with the right parameters varying appropriately we can reproduce any musical sound very faithfully with this kind of oscillator bank.
There are a few ways of generating all of those control channels without the kind of painful per-partial editing that some of the first digital synths used. The first is the PARTIALS module up top, where you can see a diagram of all the 64 partials over time. This is like a sonogram style of diagram where x is time, y is pitch, and thickness of each like is amplitude. There is also an additional axis for noisiness at each partial.
A separate application will use the open-source Loris work by Kelly Fitz and Lippold Haken to analyze sounds and create partial maps.
Another way of generating control data is with the ENVELOPES module. It’s a normal envelope generator more or less—except that it generates 64 separate envelopes, one for each partial. Generally you would trigger them all at the same time, but each does have its own trigger so they can be separate. Using the “hi scale” parameter the high envelopes will be quicker than the low ones, making a very natural kind of lowpass contour to the sound.
Finally on the top row there’s the PULSES module. This combines an LFO and a randomness generator into one module. The intensity and other parameters of the pulses can be different for every partial. So this makes modulations that can be focused on a certain frequency range, but you don’t have to mess around editing partials one by one. You could also, for example, use the pulses to trigger the envelopes all at different times.
The PULSES module was inspired by my walks in a small canyon near my house, and listening to the very finely detailed and spatially spread sounds of water running in a small creek. Each drop contributes something to the sounds and the interplay between the parts and the whole is endlessly intriguing.
To make a water drop sound, two envelopes are needed at the same time: a rise in pitch and an exponential decay in amplitude. So PULSES lets you put out two such envelopes in sync. Then of course we generalize for a wider range of functions, so we can find out, what if the drops were quantized, or had different shapes over time? A voice turning into a running river is the kind of scene that additive synthesis can paint very sensitively. The PULSES module is designed to help create sounds like this.
The SPACE module lets us position each partial in the sound independently. Coming back to the creek idea, we can hear that certain pitch ranges happen in certain locations around us due to the water speed and the resonances of different cavities. This all paints a lively acoustic scene. By positioning many little drops independently, while allowing some variation, we can approximate this kind of liveliness.
This module centers around two kinds of data, a set of positions for each partial known as home, and a vector field: a direction [x, y, z] defined at each point in a 3-dimensional space. There will be a set of both the home and the field patterns to choose from. By offering these choices, and a small set of parameters controlling the motion of the partials, such as speed, the homing tendency, and the strength of the vector field, we can quickly create a wide variety of different sonic spaces without the tedium of editing each partial independently.
The RESONATORS module is very simple and inspired by the section of the Polymoog synthesizer with the same name. It’s simply three state-variable filters in parallel, with limited bandwidth and a bit of distortion for that “warm” sound. In Sumu, a synth we could otherwise describe as “very digital,” it’s nice to have a built-in way of adding a different flavor.
So I have this interface you see above, and a sound engine, and I'm working feverishly to marry the two. To enable all of the animations and the new pop-up menu, I wrote a whole new software layer that provides a completely GPU-based UI kit and interfaces directly with the VST3 library. Because it's been such a long process this time, I'm going to "build in public" more than I am used to doing, and have a public beta period. My plan is for this to start in December. Meanwhile I hope this information gives you interested folks something to whet your appetites, and even a basis for starting to think about what kinds of patches you might want to make.
When you do the analysis in Vutu, you need to manually set the fundamental pitch for the sample. This is done with the "fundamental" dial at right. You can use "Fund. volume" to hear a test tone at that frequency.
I see what you're saying about before analysing though so I hear you had that covered. I'll leave it here in case it helps anyone else.
I'm guessing it's a sample rate problem where Vutu is not doing the right thing. a semitone is suspiciously close to 48000/44100. (1.06 vs. 1.08) Maybe your system is at 44100, the sample is at 48000 and it's not doing the right thing. Just a guess. Let me know if this seems to be the issue, for example if resampling the source before using Vutu fixes the problem.
Yes, you're good on the Metal front, I think all the product lines had it by 2012.
Hi @aejonel,
This is a good question. I would say it's relatively safe. A patch should sound like itself going forward. But this is where it gets fuzzy- i might make minor changes that I feel are improvements to sound quality, and if you're very detail-oriented, you might not think these are as minor!
An example of the kind of change I will make is reducing aliasing when FM is used. So a patch might get a little less harsh.