Cytomic announces "The Drop" resonant filter plugin
Submitted by admin on 26 May, 2011 - 14:09
There has been lots of interest in Cytomic's second product and we are proud to announce it will be an analog modelled resonant filter plugin. It is still in construction but we'll post audio demos and news until the final release which is planned for December 2011 (possibly before if we can manage).
Here's a quick rundown of the feature set so far:
- Dual filter section with a Lowpass followed by a Highpass
- Circuits include State Variable (eg SEM-1A), Sallen Key (eg MS-20), and more to be announced
- Loads of drive and character and analog style noise
- Full frequency range and perfect resonance tracking without oversampling so there is no delay for live use
- Huge amounts of resonance if you want and also a resonance limit button for DJ use to make sure you don't rip people's ears off in a club situation
- Envelope follower (analog modelled), from input or sidechain
- FM from input or sidechain
- A powerful morphing LFO capable of audio rate modulation
- Stereo and Mono processing
This example puts the smoothly morphing LFO through its paces. The LFO can be synced to BPM, and automatically retriggered, so you can smoothly alter the rate but still stay in time with your music. The shape can morph between triangle, to saw up and saw down, and an exponential curve amount which can make the LFO sound like an envelope or square wave. There is also a swing parameter and stereo offset, and best of all is you can tweak them all the parameters in real time in very musical and expressive ways.
This is the first set of examples of the just finished discrete transistor core Sallen Key filter, which is the same structure used in the MS20 rev1 filter. The resonance is set to just over self osc, then a saw input is increased in volume to saturate the filter, then the same thing done again but with the resonance way up high.
The lowpass and highpass filters are swept around on a drum loop. The first example is "clean" and uses the envelope follower at the end to beef up the funkiness. The second example increases the drive gradually and sweeps the filters around, as you can hear once the filters are swept out of band the signal is completely clean again.
Now this example is done as a worst case senario, screaming self oscillation with huge amounts of FM and no oversampling - yep, these examples were generated at 44.1 kHz, and things will only sound better if you oversample from there. All examples use the Sallen Key OTA model. The input signal is a raw unfiltered saw waveform from a Korg Monotron. The first example has high resonance, the second has huge resonance way up into self oscillation, and the third has huge resonance but slightly less drive. The FM source for the first two examples is actually another copy of The Drop in self oscillation as well, and the third example uses the saw wave output of another Korg Monotron.
These two examples use the Cascade OTA filter circuit. The first one has features the envelope follower running off the audio input in a silly bassline with the resonance just below self oscillation. The second example is an 808 drum loop, courtesy of fine sample purveyors Goldbaby with loads of output drive.
It is a little boring I know, but for those filter aficionados out there this will give you a good taste of the resonance and drive characteristics. In this example I switch between the following modes in order: State Variable OTA, State Variable Diode, Sallen Key OTA, Sallen Key Diode. The raw unfiltered saw waveform used as input is from a Korg Monotron. Each version has a different fixed resonance and drive setting.