Re: [LAD] automation on Linux (modular approach)

From: Nick Copeland <nickycopeland@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Mon Mar 22 2010 - 23:21:27 EET

> > It doesn't mean the synth will not sound good, there are just some
> > things that it
> > will not be able to do.
> >
> > Regards, nick.
>
> Indeed a B3 emulated by an Oberheim Matrix-1000 might be no good choice,
> OTOH because of the automation, you won't have any synth with a good B3
> emulation to change 20 parameters during a song, while for any
> "synthetic" sound e.g. from an Oberheim Matrix-1000 you might wish to
> change a lot of parameters during a song and changing filter parameters
> for "synthetic" sounds 128 steps are enough.
>

The Matrix 1000 users also complained of the quantisation of the mod matrix
for this beast, admittedly only when being used for very wide/wild modulation
where again the steps could be heard (*). Perhaps this is getting off the point: if
work is going to be done on a CV proposal (which is admittedly debatable) then
quantising to some level at which people have been known to complain of in the
past is not a good starting point.

The nice thing about the tuxfamily proposal is that CV is completely 'analoguous'
by which I mean analogous to the native sampling parameters. That is badly
phrased, I am likely to get hit on for saying it but it does not suffer from any worse
quantisation than the underlying audio signal. The analogue monsters took a lot
of flac when they started quantising their parameters and the tux design would
avoid such issues.

Another reason this is getting off the point is that defining a separate CV port in
Jack would obfuscate the issue, probably. The people discussing ambient control
would want CV at the native rate and that can be delivered now anyway over
audio ports - the only question is how the application uses the data on those ports.
If a new port type is defined then it will carry some quantised representation of this
data and then if any app talked about supporting CV you would not know which
type was being supported. I don't think the overhead in jack would be that high
for distributing native/audio CV and if people wanted to quantise down to fractions
of the sample rate or resolution because that is how their apps work then this could
still be applied as an interface into the native data. The reverse is naturally not true.

Nick.
* The Matrix-1000 (and related 6 and 12) are amongst the best synths ever, don't
misunderstand my critisism. When they were first released several of the hardware
magazines refered to them as the most over the top analogue synths imaginable.
If anything, a new implementation of CV should take into account the small number
of complaints that were made against it and parameter quantisation is one of them.
I still want to build an emulator for one of these however I need to finish the EMS
Synthi first as the Oberheim mod matrix was loosely based on its patch pin panel.
                                               
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Received on Tue Mar 23 00:15:08 2010

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