July Update
I’ve been unable to keep up with VCV for a while due to school, but have wrapped things up and gotten back in the game. Moving forward, I’ve developed some modules as part of a new plugin focused on fundamentals and inspired by my favorite tools. All the renders below come from Sketch (the SVG tool I use) so the actual modules will look slightly different in VCV. If anyone has suggestions for features, I’d love to hear them!
Nurse Ratchet
Nurse ratchet (inspired by One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest) is a blatant rip-off of the Make Noise 0Ctrl with a new ratcheting feature, control over envelope timings, clock pulse width, V/Oct range and offset, and a few hidden menu items for customizing the envelope shapes (i.e., vactrol emulation, PSG emulation, etc.) and changing the CV behaviors.
Quad Operator
Quad operator is my interpretation of the Humble Audio Quad Operator. It’s a 4 operator phase modulation oscillator with continuous algorithm routing.
Big Squish
Big squish is inspired half by the interface of the WMD Compressor and half by the functionality of the Ableton Live Compressor, i.e., it looks like WMD, but sounds more like Ableton. It’s your basic compressor with a side-chain input and envelope follower output. Something unique I’ve done is put skeuomorphic LED VU meters around the knobs making it very easy to visualize how much the compressor is activating / the levels throughout the gain stages.
Wave Boii
Wave boii is just a stereo sampler. There are plenty of these in the plugin library, but this one addresses a lot of the issues I run into with them. The key features:
- loads WAV, MP3, and FLAC
- Has drag n’ drop support
- Threaded file IO to prevent GUI hiccups
- Arbitrary play back control forwards and backwards through 0
- band-limiting filter to prevent aliasing
- efficient “screen” code for visualizing and zooming on waveform
- gain and pan for stereo controls (visualized on screen)
- works with samples as short as single cycle waveforms and as long as hour long DJ mixes (will test with 4 hours long podcasts and cap the duration around 4-6 hours)
- a trigger button (looping mode auto triggers and re-triggers)
I’d like to also add a EOC output, but need to find a clean way to work it into the panel.
Accumulation Station
Accumulation station is inspired by me needing the ability to solo and mute channels during development. The look is inspired by the Qu-Bit Mixology, but adds a stereo width control that I’m surprised no stereo mixers ever bother with. The width control sets the delay of the secondary channel (according to the pan setting) to a value between 1ms and 40ms to produce the Haas effect and simulate stereo width. It’s really handy for layering synth sounds into a thick fat wall or otherwise placing voices spatially in the mix. I’ve also created a unique visualization for the stereo field that will show both the panning and width around the panning control knob!
