randy's Recent Posts
The response looks pretty good overall, I wouldn't say that any major stretching has gone on. On the right side, I would say there is some spreading of the touch that exceeds what it would have left the shop with.
If you want to intervene mechanically, adding a bit of material to the rightmost spacer bar will hold the sensor more tightly together, and should reduce the spreading. What I use is a wood veneer with an adhesive back, because I have lots of this material. Anything incompressible will work equally well. thin cardboard with double-stick tape or removable spray mount to hold it in place, for example. Or, I can send you some veneer.
I would start with around 0.5mm more material over the entire bar. Then if the feel is better overall but too tight at the top and bottom, you could remove some of the material at the top and bottom. Or if it improves things but not enough, you can add more.
You can either calibrate after each change, or you can clear the calibration with "use defaults" in the app and use that as a baseline for noticing changes. In any case, proceed methodically and record the response before and after. You could use a weight of some kind on the surface as a calibration standard.
But first,
why don't you try some variations in how you are normalizing it. I do find it a bit weird that in your normalize picture there are some areas of almost zero value in the middle. This may result from pressing down harder in the middle when you normalize. Try "use defaults" and see, is the center more accurate without normalization? If so, either use the defaults or try normalizing again being sure to press very evenly. You can use an phone or a CD case for this!
When you are looking at the accuracy of touch position, look at only one touch at a time. This will give you repeatable results. Any inaccuracy in chords that is not present for single touches, is the fault of the touch tracker software not the normalization or hardware.
Also,
You could just wait and accept the ghost notes into your life until the next software update. I am sure that they will be improved by the next touch tracker. Meanwhile the thing with ghost notes is that they are tiny, so when using direct envelope control via z they may not even be heard.
I'm eager to work on the new touch tracker, but meanwhile I also need to release another plugin. So I hope some of these tips give you something to chew on, and I'll thank you in advance for your patience.
I don't know about any issues with warm temperatures. However, I guess it's possible that the combination of constant high temperatures and daily playing has caused the rubber surface of your instrument to stretch out a bit. Your report that things are going slowly more out of whack is also consistent with surface stretching.
The good news is, there is likely an easy mechanical fix for this you can do. Rest assured that we'll get your instrument working one way or another. If we can't figure out hardware or software modifications that you can do there that make it work for you, I'll take it back for repair.
First, I would like to ask for some of your time to understand what is going on, and see if my idea about stretching is right. Do you have a utility you can make movies with? Screenflow has a free trial and works well for me here.
If you can make a movie of the response from a single finger as it moves around the surface, I will be able to see if the surface is doing what it should be mechanically. To do this, you want to turn "voices" to 0. This will cause the display to show the raw, unfiltered data. Set the view mode to "calibrated" and run a finger left to right in five passes, one over the center of each row.
I made this kind of movie, just doing one pass at top and one at bottom, and it looks like this: http://madronalabs.com/media/temp/touches0.mp4
I would describe my Soundplane as working well, but you can see from this movie that the single touch spreads out more in the upper right of the Soundplane than other places. The software is able to correct for this, but if it were much more spreading, there would need to be a hardware correction to fix it.
Being a curious guy, maybe you have opened up your Soundplane already? If so, you will have noticed that there is some thin veneer applied to the basswood spacers that you see when you take the back off. These spacers hold the sensor boards against the surface when the back is attached. The veneer is applied by me when making each instrument, and sometimes I have to go through a few iterations of tweaking the veneer to get the spacing just right because each surface is a bit different.
Long story short, you can likely add some veneer strips to compensate for the stretching and fix the instrument yourself. First, let's see if the stretching is the problem.
Zones are currently implemented using the JSON files. You can see the examples like "30sliders.json" in the distribution that show how to make all kinds of different setups within one OSC port. But splitting touches to different OSC ports is not working.
I'm very very close to sending out an update that should have this feature working in it. There will be an example in it to try.
Here are recent videos of some inspiring Soundplane performances. Hearing and seeing what you are doing gets me fired up to work on more instruments. Thanks to all the players / composers.
Lee Gauthier
Mark Harris
Gaël Navard
Nice! I'm glad you find that Aalto pairs well with acoustic instruments, I think so too. Thanks for sharing.
Using aliases to folders should work. If it doesn't, checking permission is the only thing I could think of, also. I'm going to investigate this along with some other Kaivo issues very soon.
You may have noticed that Kaivo is slow to open–this is because it loads all the samples into RAM when it is loaded. In general it is just not set up well to use a lot of samples right now. I would recommend copying the ones you want to use into your main samples directory, and maybe getting rid of some of the factory ones you don't use, to speed up load times. I'll improve this for the next update.
What I like better than the idea of bipolar / unipolar switches, is the addition of some way to offset / scale the data more easily after it comes from the source.
I think a signal coming from a source such as "vox" should reflect what the actual data is---in this case a voice number from 0-3. With sequencer output I can see more of a case for adding an output option since it's not representing anything in particular.
There's no way to change the location of the Madrona Labs folder, but using aliases in the patches / samples folders should work. If you tell me what OS you are using, I can try to reproduce the problem.
Some signals are unipolar and others bipolar. I tried to go for the most common uses of the signals in deciding which to make them. I think this could be explained better in the manual.
Hopefully the pan modulation you describe is not too tedious to set up with the aid of the animated dials. looking at the four signal values all at once in the dial, you should be able to dial in the amount of modulation you want quite quickly.
The lack of fine tuning of small amounts of modulation is a problem sometimes. I would like to add a numerical mode for precise control when it's needed.
Welcome aboard, and thanks for the feedback and ideas. I'm always trying to find ways to do things better. I've thought that some time down the road it would be cool to be able to interpolate between presets, so maybe the "advanced preset browser" can be the same UI that allows that.
There is one big Kaivo optimization I plan to do, which will put each voice on a separate core of your computer. This should make a lot of difference on your quad core CPU. It's not a simple change and I have some other things to finish first, but it's definitely on my roadmap, so please hang in there.
Kaivo should also benefit a little from the next update where it gets the features I've been adding to Aalto. This won't be as dramatic though.
Wow, looks like my post got mangled somehow.
I was trying to say, if you use shorter files, you should be able to make a 2D wavetable with accurate pitch. With anything shorter than a second I was not able to hear pitch errors, so a stack of 4x128 waveforms should be in tune just fine and offer lots of wavetable goodness.
Hi @rydan,
Sorry I dropped the ball on this. It looks like I missed your first message here entirely and I didn't have this issue on my list of Kaivo bugs. There's only one of me and I'm definitely capable of slipping up sometimes, so it doesn't hurt to remind me if you're waiting on an answer. I
With the help of your video I was able to reproduce what you are hearing. I should be able to fix this for the next update. Meanwhile if you use shorter files (
Hi Adrian,
Kaivo will at least get a minor update soon with the many Aalto features that were new in Aalto 1.6. Beyond that I'm not sure what else I can add to Kaivo before my next plugin comes out. I will do the patch / sample installer thing at some time for sure, it's a feature I want very much.
Hi, and welcome.
VST plugins are put in a standard location on your computer so all the different DAWs know where to find them. on Mac OS X that is in (your computer) / (your hard drive) / Library / Audio / Plug-Ins / VST. The installer will put it right there.
To see your Library folder on Mac OS you can hold down the Option key while selecting the “Go” menu from the Finder. Sorry this is a bit complicated, it’s Apple’s decision to make ~/Library hard to access.
There are also some Ableton settings that need to be correct in order to use external VSTs or Audio Units. Here are the relevant docs from Ableton:
Ableton / VST docs
Thanks for the report. Of course Kaivo should sound the same when rendered. So I'll treat this as a bug and investigate.
The audio engine renders the same samples in either case, and I never have heard any difference in testing. My first guess is this is a problem with MIDI notes or controllers not being played back correctly.
You could try different buffer settings in Live to see if there is any difference.
Sure, Kaivo can make very nice wavetable sounds. If you look at the oscillator samples called "sine to square" or "sine to saw" you will see an example. There are only 4 "waves" in these, which is the maximum number of different waves you can have vertically.
You can also add another axis for a vector synthesis type of oscillator. Kaivo's grains will snap to the nearest appropriate zero crossing if "sync" is on. So if you put a large number of slightly different waves going left to right, this is like a long transwave. You could just record a filter sweep or something to try it out. Probably you want all granulator settings turned on: follow, sync, and wrap.
I love this project. I hope I get to try it one of these days.
Thanks for sharing your experience with AU versus VST support in Max. I think the plugin hosting was dramatically changed for Max 7, so there may still be some issues to work out.
In general, Aalto signals from the patcher simply run at audio rate and are not smoothed. A few of them are smoothed after they come out of the patcher in order to avoid aliasing. There are different amounts of smoothing going on in different places and a lot of it was simply tuned by ear, so unfortunately I don't have a good list for you. This could be something to document better.
A quick search of the code turns up the few parameters that have a vactrol response:
- oscillator fm index
- oscillator timbre
- gate level
Bravo! I love these quite different pieces—I would say of both of them that they use their time in a way that is well-considered. You are also using the expressive capabilities of the Soundplane very fully, with a kind of gestural language that is very suited to the instrument. I look forward to more!
Really nice Mark! Such a great variety in articulation demonstrated here, you are really making the melody sing.
I hesitate to even mention a date because I'm in research mode now, working on some changes. But I would like to get started on a new run soon, later this summer I hope.
There isn't an easy one. I should really add this as a KEY module option.
If you just want to tune to one specific thing and leave it there, you could make a Scala scale with a kbm mapping. Say you want to tune everything two cents sharp and you are working in the 12-equal scale. Then save this to a text file my12-equal.scl:
! my12-equal.scl
!
12
!
100.
200.
300.
400.
500.
600.
700.
800.
900.
1000.
1100.
2/1
then save this to another file my12-equal.kbm:
! keyboard mapping my12-equal.kbm:
!
! Size of map (greater than or equal to the number of notes in the scale
! to be mapped). The pattern repeats every so many keys:
12
! First MIDI note number to retune:
0
! Last MIDI note number to retune:
127
! Middle note where scale degree 0 is mapped to:
60
! Reference note for which frequency is given:
69
! Frequency to tune the above note to (floating point e.g. 440.0):
440.0
! Scale degree to consider as formal octave (determines difference in pitch
! between adjacent mapping patterns):
12
! Mapping.
! The numbers represent scale degrees mapped to keys. The first degree is for
! the given middle note, the next for subsequent higher keys.
! For an unmapped key, put in an "x". At the end, unmapped keys may be left out.
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Put these in a folder in the Scales directory ~/Music/Madrona Labs/Scales. Select them in the key scale menu.
THEN, by changing the 440.0 in the kbm file to some other value and reloading you can get exactly the frequency you want. You may have to close the Aalto winow and open it again to see the new scl / kbm files.
A dial would be easier, I know.
[EDIT]
I'm not sure what I was thinking about above. Getting the oscillator in tune is very easy to do with the main OSC pitch control. Since the oscillator is FM-based, both the modulator and carrier change by the same amount when you shift the tuning. Holding down the shift key enables fine tuning on any dial, including the oscillator pitch. This makes it easy to dial in pitch in 0.1 Hz increments.
I recognize the need to switch between presets while tuning to some other instrument, which currently will reset the oscillator pitch. So I'll still get to adding a master tune when I can.
Could I basically turn the Y quantizing off by setting each cell in a column to be the same note? Then it would effectively function the same as the Continuum fingerboard.
yes, there's a default setting that does exactly this. If you set every row to send the same notes, there is one whole axis devoted to controlling timbre. If each row sends different notes, you can trade this timbre control for more notes, while still using y within each key to control timbre.
I should add for context that when the Soundplane talks to a computer, it just sends the raw pressure data. So everything we are talking about can be changed easily in software and if there's a useful option that doesn't exist for some reason I will add it.
The Soundplane is a lot like the Continuum. The underlying sensor is very much a continuous device capable of smooth changes. The grid of keys on top of it is applied after the initial data is gathered.
so like the continuum, Y is never quantised.
I would say it's always quantized. Which is to say, it always sends the nearest grid value and does not vary continuously. You are either in one row of keys, or another, not between.
It's probably clearer to talk about what data generated from the Y measurements are quantized, because this is what is really going on. Pitch data generated from Y is always quantized to the note grid. Timbre control data generated from y is continuous within the row of keys, or zone.
Thanks for that detailed response @thetechnobear, it's really special to hear from someone who has had a chance to compare the two instruments.
I would say it's more a question of feel than sound. These instruments can both play many different synthesizers, and a Continuum and Soundplane playing a given synth sound will sound the same, but they will feel different, have different limitations, and that will probably cause the playing to be different too.
It will be a little while before the next batch of Soundplanes is available. I'll make sure to get some more Soundplane-specific patches and videos out into the world by then.
Hi Björn,
Thanks for the feedback. I know, as a designer it really bothers me. Unfortunately the problem is mixed up in the web / PayPal system, so it's not too easy to fix. I'm rolling out a whole new licensing system soon, and it will handle your name properly.
Very interesting. I always play mine flat.
Sorry to hear it. Aalto CM has not had an update for a long time. I will give it one after my next plugin is done.
So, I guess you are OK but not ideal now. Sorry it's not great for you. It's hard to diagnose what might be going on on Windows machines where there are so many different kinds of audio cards and drivers.
You can't really trust what different programs say about CPU load relative to one another. They measure different things. Look in the Performance tab in the Task Manager if you want to compare different programs in a fair way.