Friday 3 December 2010

Endless Series Version 3 - Progress Report

Over the past 6 months I have been porting my plugins (which were previously developed using Synthedit and MaxMSP/Pluggo) to hard-coded AudioUnits/VSTs. This has been a substantial amount of work but I'm getting there now. The DSP for the plugins is mostly done and I am working on the UIs. The new versions are compatible with more hosts, load faster and support multiple processors.

Sonogram of a recent composition using Endless Series v3
For Endless Series version 3 I have added many cool new features. If you don't know about the original version of these plugins see here:

http://www.olilarkin.co.uk/index.php?p=eseries

Here is a sneak preview of the main changes from version 2.
  • Endless Series is now one plugin (you can switch between tone generator, ring modulator, flanger, filter and phaser effect modes). This makes it much easier to experiment with the different timbres that each effect provides, whilst keeping settings such as the rate of the glissando/steps.
  • The pitch shift mode is gone and a new bandpass filter mode is added
  • True stereo operation: Endless Series v1 and v2 were "mono to stereo" plugins. Version 3 can work like this but can also be used in true stereo mode (for all the different effect modes), and the two channels can be offset for detuning effects
  • MIDI triggering: In the stepped mode the steps can be triggered by sending MIDI notes to the plugin. This means you can sync the stepped tone up to your host, so it steps on each 1/4 note , or even program in a rhythm and play the shepard tone with that rhythm 
  • The "phase" of the glissando/scale can be reset with a specific midi note, meaning that you can reproduce the same glissando/scale each time
  • In the "Tone generator" mode, you can add harmonics for a richer sound
  • When in stepped mode an amplitude envelope can be used to make "gaps" between the steps of the shepard scale
  • The internal DSP features improved interpolation methods and other tweaks
There's still a way to go (the time it takes to make GUIs is not to be under-estimated). I will be offering a generous upgrade price for existing owners when the plugins are eventually released, which will hopefully be first quarter 2011. I'll post some audio examples here in the near future.

Thursday 4 November 2010

Strange Vibrations

I'm organising and performing at a free concert in York. For more details, see the facebook event page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=167434656607933

Sunday 19 September 2010

Saturday 4 September 2010

Kasio phase distortion synthesiser

This is a max patch that I have been working on for a while. There is an ongoing discussion on the C74 forums about the lack of fully featured synth examples, so I thought I would polish this up and put it out there. It's loosely modelled on a Casio CZ101 and uses phase distortion synthesis, which is a kind of FM. The UI is purely functional. It doesn't use any externals.

Free to use in non-commercial projects.


Sunday 9 May 2010

Repairing Korg MonoPoly keyboard contacts

I had some keys not triggering on my Korg MonoPoly - a common problem with this and other synths of the era. I cleaned the contacts as per the old crow tutorial (twice) and still some of them didn't work - I guess the conductive rubber had just worn away. Thanks to some advice from the Analogue Heaven mailing list I applied some conductive paint to the contacts which seems to have done the trick.

flickr set

Saturday 3 April 2010

Autotalent vst/au v0-2

I've updated the autotalent vst/au plugin to be in line with Tom's LADSPA version. I didn't test it very thoroughly yet so there might be some issues. There are some cool new features, see http://web.mit.edu/tbaran/www/autotalent-0.2_refcard.pdf

[EDIT 04/04/2010 - new version fixing crash with reaper]


Thursday 4 March 2010

Autotalent vst/au

Lately i have been learning to use IPlug by Cockos which is part of WDL: a fantastic library of handy C++ code, with a very generous license. IPlug allows you to build cross platform VST plugins (and AU on Mac) from the same codebase. It is very simple to use (compared to the standard VST or AU SDKs, and the implementation for a fully working plugin is relatively small. Anyway, one of the first things I have done with it is to port autotalent to VST/AU.

Get it here:


ol.kslider


This is a keyboard ui control that is (in my opinion) much nicer than the standard max kslider. It supports MIDI input, which has always been a problem with the normal kslider. Arguments control how many octaves are shown and what pitch to start at.

Free to use in non-commercial projects.


Wednesday 10 February 2010

ol.autotalent~ v0-2

A new version of ol.autotalent~

changes:

- now works with different sample rates
- fixed crash when deleting the external with the dsp on

http://www.olilarkin.co.uk/blog/files/ol_autotalent~v0-2.zip

Sunday 17 January 2010

Gemdays 2010


I'll be talking at the "MaxMSP Powerusers Symposium" ;-) at the Gemdays 2010 festival in Huddersfield on the 30th Jan. It's free and runs from 1pm till 5. More info here:

Saturday 16 January 2010

autotalent msp port


I ported Tom Baran's open source LADSPA auto-tuner to an msp object. It works pretty well, but the pitch shifting is a bit grungy at the moment.