Jonas here, I recently released my first module for VCV Rack. Hopefully the first of many.
Electric Ensemble is a chorus/ensemble effect. A delay line with 8 hard-panned taps. Each read-head is modulated with the same LFO but offset phases. It can sound very thick.
Rate and Depth controls the LFO (moving the taps back and forth)
Spread controls the “distance” between the taps. At the highest value it can act a bit like “Early Reflections” from a reverb
LP, HP are Low-pass and High-pass filters
Drive is Saturation
Mix blends the dry and wet signals
Find below a short video showing what it can sound like.
Here’s another clip showing how it can be used to make a single-oscillator synth (like the 303) can be made to sound more like a multi-oscillator synth…
The short answer is that I want to keep the modules as simple as possible.
Certain things would be straight forward to add CV support to, but some things create more questions for me… like… do I want it to sound good when a parameter is modulated at audio rate?.. Keeping stuff as a “normal” parameter kept the focus on where my efforts went…
If/when I add CV controls some might be internally “slew limited”/filtered if it’s needed for lower cpu usage…
I also have some other ideas for modules that I want to get out…
Usually I disagree with @almostEric, but here a lot of these controls really are crying out for CV control. Like at least rate and depth? I’m sure you can do it without too much CPU cost. Other modules do, right? btw, This things sound really nice. good job!
yes, re-caculating filters every sample can be a problem. If I may suggest a couple of ways I deal with this? One is to use filters that can be quickly re-calculated. maybe you can use a “low quality” state variable filter that is cheap to re-calculate (I do that a lot)? Or use come kind of interpolating lookup table for the coefficients (I never had much luck with this). And there’s always the trick that I know @almostEric uses - don’t do the calculation if nothing changes!
Also, you could consider not updating every sample. This is controversial - a lot of people do not like sacrificing the quality should someone run an audio freq input into your spread control. but do you really care? I almost always update my coefficients every 4 samples.
Good article! My favourite is lookup tables and using fixed point math for the things that will index into it… and yeah I’m aware of most of the techniques but also was trying to avoid the work
