VSTFX: La Ride

[wlangfor@uoguelph.ca]

You know I was thinking. This same idea is very like that of Youtube's normalizing and whatnot. It would seem to Me that technology like this could be in a standalone .exe and could used to provide an online service.

I plan to provide one that allows You to master vocals separately, and drums, guitars etc, bass. As well of course as masters. That'd be crazy.

And if I ever did commercial, 1 dollar a month would be more than enough in profit. Crazy what You can do with flowstone.

[wlangfor@uoguelph.ca]

So, I gave it some thought and it would make sense to be able to both fulfill My initial vision of having a slower style of pumping for a gain rider with an optional realtime decibel to averaging conversion.

And it's not too hard to do both.


So, Here's what I accomplished with Ruby:


So, first I compared realtime versus outputted ticks with a minisynth output to mono l&r. It was close enough that I decided it was worth tweaking. So, I kept multiplying each signal by 2 over and over until the output was consistent. I like the effect; It's very earthy.

And here's How I achieved that with a ruby tick and a bunch of playing with scaling.


It's certainly not perfect, but that was the whole point. I'll add another switch so that realtime and vintage mode can be selected. My father used to work with electronics. All in all I can tell You; Even if the capacitors and resistors which were used to run governors; They'd still only be at this level of efficiency. The only contradiction had been of course clockwork that was made with refined metals.

Because the oxide was wrought from the steel; Its movement was reliable and measurable, but capacitors and resistors of the day were still made with imperfect materials. Now they use carbon I believe which can be standardized.

Here's the latest schematic with that functioning and I'll get the realtime version up and going probably by tomorrow.

edit: OK, last updated version was too fast. And too many nyquists is too much of a good thing, OMG. I think realtime might actually hurt the ears due to exponential amplitude and average.

Glad nobody downloaded it, lol. This new version has 40 ms of de-zippers to counter-act the effect. Realtime? Be careful what You wish for. Have a listen in realtime and that's about 800-900 ticks per second; Just imagine if it was realtime.

[lalalandsynth]

What are you referring to when you say governors .

[wlangfor@uoguelph.ca]

What are you referring to when you say governors .

An old style of limiter they don't make anymore. It used percent and it had an antiquated decibel detector with which it based the average on minus or positive. Usually for high end radio stations in the 20's 30's 40's 50's.

[wlangfor@uoguelph.ca]

OK, so I've been updating and innovating. It causes the ears to buzz if it's too fast; So I found a happy medium using a special algorithm involving the de-zippers.

I'd realized using a trick that does seem to work; And it makes the volume or volume changes sound a bit like waves plugins, but less plasticy. Pretty exciting.

So, I also did My homework; Looked at this schema and figured what it does and does'nt do. And I made this video which clearly shows that it would have always made a linear [0-1] nyquist wave, lest You set the averager way down.

I documented this very well in a Youtube vid:


So, I'm glad How it turned out though, I'm not insulted and this led to innovation, because obviously the timing was off. And while the solution I came up with is not as technical as it could be; It sounds great. And I like that. I felt it would have been a strange and hard trick to create an asm linear to db and db averager which ultimately was timed like an envelope. I guess the challenge I had realized was; Ultimately it always meant there would be latency enforced. When in fact I just wanted a bit of latency.

Take a look at the LA smooth modules I came up with and You'll get the idea. It's actually a really fast slide that works well just using dezips. Pretty neat.

I'm ready now to make some presets for this and finalize it so I can move on to My next plug.

Newest version on first post.

[wlangfor@uoguelph.ca]

This version worked quite well, aside from the humble way it was made. But, it's glitchy; works well - Then sometimes stops a load, or causes lag. So I will find another method to achieve the same thing. I also wanted to find a method to cause pumping or dipping. If I can have the levels drop down to say -20 each time; It would sound much better.

So, I have learned a great deal; And a better product is on the way.

[wlangfor@uoguelph.ca]

Ok, so I found some really good oldschool db to linear conversions in the way of dsp code. I'll be able to convert this bulky, makeshift code into something very like the code that the waves gain rider uses.

Good things to come with this project, but it took a while to both understand (first) and to find some reliable, low cpu cost solutions. And those people who had made such things which I'll use are: Martin Vicanek, Cytosonic, Aliasant, Exonerate and MvdLee as well as some examples by Tulamide.

[wlangfor@uoguelph.ca]

BTW, the new version of this project is called the governor and it uses realtime dsp code and not triggers.

It was a nice experiment though and I think it's useful to use similar methods to get ahold of float array values especially from dsp code or asm.

Thanks all for your feedback.

When I get governor working with less attack I'll post it. Currently it's a bit destructive but it works well.