Has an update broken my drone?

[kyle.legate]

Hi there, this is doing my head in and I wonder if anyone can help. Back in March I finished and recorded a patch that had a drone element composed from 4 alloy modules and lots of delay. Picture:

The sustain was really long (over 30 sec) and I used that as the drone. You can hear it underneath the shrieking ‘guitar’ in this song: Stay Where You're To | Kloaca

The problem is I try to play the song now and the sustain peters out in just a few seconds, which is unusable. I cannot figure out what’s wrong but I am pretty sure the problem occurs after the first Venom VCA Mix module. I could remove the CV from the mix module and get a much harsher version of the drone but this is not an option because I mix between two copies of this arrangement using DocB Blender to eliminate the initial attack and blend in the two sustains. This requires routing the sound from the first mixer to the ‘silent’ Alloy array before striking it, and if I remove the sound from the active array it dies. Therefore the sustain used to occur after the mixer. Screenshot below of the whole arrangement for the brave:

One button switches sources and the other triggers the strike. The mix is at 0% on the VCV delay to kill the drone between takes.

Could there have been updates to either of the delays I use that could have killed the sustain? I’m hoping to play this in a festival in July and am gutted that it no longer works. I have posted the top patch to Patchstorage in case anyone wants to play with it. I can post the second one on request (with a free compressor).

broken drone | Patchstorage

[codyge (CV funk)]

I’m not sure if anything I did in my updates would have changed Alloy much. I did add a volume knob in a Dec update, so perhaps that could have messed things up? If you need to revert to an older version of the plugin, you can get them on github.

I opened up your patch, and I was able to get the delay longer by increasing the volume of all the Alloy modules to max, and by increasing the overdrive as well. And I increased chan4 vol on the vcamix for good measure. Cool souding patch btw.

I try to make my updates not break things, but of course, sometimes something like a runaway resonance or whatnot might be an important feature to another user!

I hope it wasn’t my updates that broke it for you, but if so I apologize!

[kyle.legate]

Thanks a lot, increasing the volume definitely helped, and I found I could further increase the sustain by maxxing the resonance and increasing the overdrive on the fourth Alloy. Thanks so much for your help, this song is back on the menu!