May be helpful: Polyphonic Test Generators

Development
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Hi Folks

I’m working on adding polyphony to the surge-rack modules and also to my sort of not-very-good BaconMusic plugins I wrote a couple of years ago. (I have plans to fix them up quite a bit now 1.0 is shipping). In doing so I realized my workflow sort of was broken a bit by polyphony. It used to be when working on a module I would set up a self playing circuit with seq3 or some such and then you know, develop, run, see, quit, develop, run see, quit, etc… but with polyphony I didn’t have a good thing to generate polyphonic sequences for me to play with.

So I wrote a couple of pure utility modules in the BaconMusic module set which generate polpyhonic notes kinda like you might get from a midi keyboard, without having to mash on a midi keyboard.

The first (“PolyGenerator”) makes one of 4 types of sequences. The second (“MidifilePlayer”) plays an arbitrary midi file but right now I don’t have a file selector hooked up, so it is really “Goldberg Variation Number 5 player”. They don’t really have panels or anything yet - for now they are dev-only utilities.

If you think that’s useful to you adding poly please feel free to try them. They are on the “candidate_v1.0.1” branch of https://github.com/baconpaul/BaconPlugs and build against the latest rack no problem (you will need to git submodule update --init --recursive before you build the modules). Also if you end up using them and have improvements I am happy to take PRs. And if you ignore this completely that’s also fine. It’s just a favor in case you are looking for the same thing I was looking for. And if there’s some obvious module out there I could have used that meant I didn’t need these I’m all ears. It was only a couple of hours of hacking.

Here’s a couple of videos of them in action with the “ChipWaves” oscillator (an NES chip waveform emulator which is now polyphonic) and the surge envelope generator (which is now also polyphonic).

Hope this helps someome!

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good idea

I’ve adapted the graphic meters as OUT poly testers

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Ooh is that something I can get? The viz module is handy but something like a poly-scope would be really useful.

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if you use a mac I can provide a release
the problem is that the Rack ABI is still “moving” :slight_smile:

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Did you see the way I used your old modules in my first Piong video? It was pretty good as ASMR.

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No - please do share!

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Yeah I do use a Mac but agree binary only is too tricky right now as we both do dev. Look forward to abi stable!!

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Bare in mind that it is about 1:36:00 long and you only see the full patch right at the end. I did another couple of Piong videos after this but I didn’t use your modules.
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Hi! I’ve been updating my modules for a couple of days now adding polyphony to everything. It was super instructive. Along the way I collapsed the midi player and generator into a single module which really helped me debug.

Here’s a video showing the final form, driving basically the same network (ChipWaves, the surge poly ADSR, into vca and sum and out).

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