Do you use these modules with single cycle wave forms? Or with long multi-minute vocal tracks? Or with pre-recorded modular noise? Or with breakbeat samples? How do you use them?
Lomas for short drums/percussions. Mainly the nice collection of fingersnaps and claps I once found and a set of bonks, rrrrrrrts and tcks I recorded off of our bicycle;)
I fairly often play with Voxglitch. With drumloops or other rhythmic content, naturally. And it seems I need to look at the Studio? because I mainly control the old Autobreak’s slices with the Digital sequencer and this seems to be a package now? @clone45 You’ve been awesomely busy! Also: GrooveBox.
Otherwise, not beats:
All things Nysthi (Simpliciter, mostly. I like to have the Tape expansion) for longer, other samples and/or which are recorded on the fly, within the … piece or while jamming.
I use autobreak for drum loops for now, but occasionally I record some sequences too and mangle them with ratchet and “re-ordering” the loops. It sounds mental, I really love it. The only downside is that you have to record it beforehand. BUT I asked Bret to maybe implement some kind of live recording expander or option… We’ll see how it goes.
I use Simpliciter for one track drone loops. And… Multitrack thingie… MusicalBox 2 for some kind of drony chords or drones+melodies. Like here:
I also use samples to play with Basinski ideas. Like two samplers degrading the recording while sending it back and forth. It sounds cool, not my idea though. But maybe I am the first one to do that in VCV, haha, cause I started doing that just after downloading NYSTHI collection few years ago.
Also I use Squinky’s SFZ player. It is also a sampler, but of a different kind. SFZ player + your Celei was my favorite combo for a couple of months, haha. I was doing the minimalistic piano music in VCV, it sounded very nice. The only downside is that there’s no VCA in SFZ player, so it only plays when receiving the gate. No triggers, no envelope… But still it is very nice
I love samples! I used to have a very big sample collection with my field recordings and samples from movies that I watched and all that. Sadly my old HDD died and I became old and lazy, so I don’t record anything myself, instead I search the webs for interesting samples. And sometimes it’s better.
There most assuredly is a VCA and EG, but it’s controlled by the patch, so you can’t get at it. A lot of patches map velocity to VAC, and there is of course a Velocity input.
Ahhh, I see. Velocity input really confused me, cause I don’t use velocity this way… I usually do it afterwards with effects and VCA. I was thinking it just picks the samples based on velocity. And I think it does… Anyway, if you ever feel like returning to make modules, it would be nice to have ADSR there somewhere and trigger input too… No pressure though, I like this module the way it is now too
Yes, many SFZ files do use velocity to select samples. It’s quite common to have both - velocity select one of four, then velocity also modified the volume (vcs). You could easily edit an SFZ file so the release was super long, then use your own eg and VCA on it.
Unfortunately I stopped making modules in 2021, so I doubt SFZ player will see more updates.
Hi, since I’ve been mentioned and @FiroLFO suggested me to join, I’d like to introduce you to my sample player module. It’s in beta (or maybe still alpha) version and If anyone is interested in testing it, let me know.
It mainly has EG, VCA, Polyphonic and different interpolation modes.
Unfortunately I use only windows and don’t know how to make other platforms build (I remember I read via Linux) . Maybe here there’s some Mac user that could compile it?
I’ll try and test this too, I use samplers in almost every patch:
Lomas Sampler: for playing random one-shot samples from a folder. Useful for glitchy beats but annoyingly mono.
cf Player: for stereo drum samples and short loops - I find that loops much longer than a few seconds crash it, and also the V/Oct input seems to have dodgy tuning. Haven’t reported either of these issues, I just use something else.
Nysthi: Sussudio for longer samples/loops. Great for ambient, I like how you can thicken stuff up by playing back at different octaves, having one playhead backwards etc, then send the playhead’s outputs to different filters/fx etc. I quite often record a whole patch, or parts of a patch and throw it into Sussudio to reprocess with more fx, or use as a freeze to save CPU. I used to use Simpliciter a lot, but it’s started completely crashing VCV on Windows now. I like to sample live audio in a patch, and spit it back out. Great for glitchy beats, but I also used to make a lot of guitar effects where the live guitar sound goes into ‘micro-looping’, and almost granular sound where short sections are repeated randomly. Complex Simpler/confusing Simpler still work OK for this, but click more and aren’t as versatile. I’ve used these for synth patches where I’m using looped waveforms too, and that’s also fine.
Haven’t used the VoxGlitch stuff for a while, but checking out autobreak again and the groovebox is on my list of stuff to do. A live input for that would be great.
I think I’ve tried every sampler that has an audio input for the micro-looping fx thing. I haven’t found one I’m totally happy with. One day I’ll finish learning Pure Data and make my own!
I also bought Arturia’s Pigments, mainly for the granular sample engine (obviously the other synth engines are great too) but also to use as a traditional sampler, playing back pad samples etc.
Wow, Sussudio looks amazing. I never used it. Very interesting.
Oh, these MusicalBoxes look as scary as … some NYSTHI modules. (Sorry I couldn’t find a better example. Speaking of scary looking modules I always think of NYSTHI first.)
Yeaah, they are kind of uninviting, that’s true… But when you get used to them, they are not scary at all. What I don’t like about NYSTHI is… smallness. You know, all these small modules, like 1hp envelope or something like that. I am blind as is, I don’t want to torture my eyes even more, haha. But it’s not really really bad. Just… yeah, also uninviting
that looks pretty cool. Do you find it saves enough CPU to do linear 1 and linear 2? I always suspected you might as well do third order instead of that stuff. Have you found a significantly lighter cpu utilization with the other modes?
Also, you could put that interp mode on a param, and control the param from a menu - you would get serialization for free and would end up with less code, I think. Another advantage of that approach is that once you have a c++ class to make a menu item that controls a param you can re-use it in other modules - of course compounding the code savings.
Description says it’s polyphonic - is that true? It appears to be stereo only… I’m probably missing it.
It it really OK to load a new sample while one is already playing? I can’t say it’s not, but that code doesn’t look thread safe. If the UI changes totalSampleC while the module is reading it, will it really be ok?
make a linux VM with the free vmware player. that gives you linux. It also lets you install the rack build toolchain, so you can make all three platforms. You just need to grab the mac SDK once from somewhere…
Or you can use github actions like most ppl do, then I don’t think you need to do anything…
Also: GrooveBox.
