OK Paul, that makes sense. I see you’ve made another post above re: a patch. I’ll give this another go at some point. Defintely liking the FX VST especially running it in Rack’s Host FX module. Good work!
Thanks! I got it updated tonight so it should in theory work with a clean checkout and clean build with gcc12 now. (It does on arch for surge proper)
The “Surge Dark” skin included in the VST is pretty ok, maybe someone can port some of the widgets and design style to Rack version, since it’s consistent with the main product:
The actual default (“Surge Classic”), though, is not very easy to look at in my opinion. Seems like design of the Rack modules is roughly based on that, so some people will have the same negative reactions.
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the dark look would be more popular, but the UI is still awfully utilitarian. Looking at the VCO I would have no idea how cool it is. Although that waveform display helps. And the modules are such space wasters. Look at Surge Rotary (an excellent module, I think I mention it in the Organ-3 module). That module is huge, but it has so few controls on it! and even then it resorts to sideways labels and small fonts. All the space to show the values, which you don’t need - it’s all on the tooltips.
But, this stuff is hard. That’s why my module look so plain. Find a decent designer and get them to do some stuff.
Two off topic questions. The patch player have 8 inputs that I never knew if them do something. There’s any preset using them? And, is the Surge lv2 development on stand-by? There’s any issue with lv2 in general? Thanks.
Those inputs map to the macros if I recall The lv2 doesn’t work very well and never has. When hand written it never worked, and the juce community fork we use today has bugs. Maybe when we go to juce 7 it will improve, but right now juc 7 produces an lv2 that doesn’t work in reaper. Use the vst3 or clap.
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I can make dark the default sure.
“Find a designer to design things” is excellent advice. So: Any designers here who want to design things?
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I’d really like to help out on the design side but it’s quite a chunk of work and I’m not sure I have the capacity to commit to it yet - certainly not for at least a month anyway. If you’re still in need of a designer in a month or so let’s chat.
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The lovely thing about the surge project is we don’t have any deadlines! So if you are willing and have capacity would love to have you on the team when you can.
I think the observation I made - I don’t really use rack - is why they feel “wrong”. Also a bit of history - I wrote these plugins when we were making surge 1.6/1.7 since i couldn’t get a good handle on what some of the modules were doing in the VST so I ported the rack modules at first as a debugging tool for me. Hook up a scope and voila! I think those two factors are why they feel more ‘technical’ than ‘euro-rack musical’.
But the core DSP all works! And we can go module by module once we answer a couple of big questions. And we are a friendly open contribution project. So happy to have anyone who wants to help help!
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Oh and those big questions are
- What’s the overarching look and feel (of course)
- Do we have a module per oscillator class? A module per effect? If not we need dynamic labels which is what makes the SurgeOSC seem foreign.
- How do we deal with concepts like tempo sync, extend, deactivate and deform which are part of surge.
- How do we deal with external content like wavetables in the wavetable synth
If we know the answer to those then
- What should classic, modern, and string oscillator look like?
- What should the wavetable and window oscillator look like?
- What would rotary, tree monster, and delay FX panels look like?
That’s sort of the way I think about it at least
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Where “works” means works astoundingly well, way better than most. I think I’ve mentioned in public that for a long time my “Booty Shifter” was the only frequency shifter in VCV. Then Surge came along and that frequency shifter works better than mine (in terms of sideband suppression over a wide frequency range. Although I like the UX on mine better). And that boring looking OSC has the only sub-octave I’ve ever seen that doesn’t alias like crazy. Super good stuff.
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Yep - that’s why I’m interested in the design because they really do deserve to get used a lot more.
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- What’s the overarching look and feel (of course)
We’ll get to that 
- Do we have a module per oscillator class? A module per effect? If not we need dynamic labels which is what makes the SurgeOSC seem foreign.
A module per oscillator class / per effect sounds like the right approach to me. I think dynamic labels should be avoided unless there is exceptionally good reason for having one.
- How do we deal with concepts like tempo sync, extend, deactivate and deform which are part of surge.
Tempo sync is essentially just a clock input right? Like on the Chronoblob delay for example. Can you tell me more about the other 3 please?
- How do we deal with external content like wavetables in the wavetable synth
We could look at how Valley Terrorform does it as an example but there may well be other ways. What is the wavetable format that Surge uses - is it Serum type wavetables?
If we know the answer to those then
- What should classic, modern, and string oscillator look like?
- What should the wavetable and window oscillator look like?
- What would rotary, tree monster, and delay FX panels look like?
That will all come later
That’s sort of the way I think about it at least
Happy to take this to PM if you like
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Seconded.
Ok! Well it is super easy to change the generic fx already to be way more compact with fixed labels.
Will think about best way to templatize the oscillator class. I actually go to a lot of trouble to have the type be switchable and I can remove all that code if we don’t want multi oscillators
As to extend and deform - they are switches on parameters. If you grab the surge xt vst and use the modern oscillator for instance the triangle wavefoem actually has like 7 modes, and you can take the unison detune and change it from ± 100ct to ± 1200ct. Similarly the sine oscillator has a built in filter pair which you can deactivate or modulate
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Before fully committing to that, would you mind listing all the Oscillator types/classes please?
And therefore how many different modules it would be in total, depending on whether you had multi oscillators or separate ones.
Edit: Sorry if this sounds like I’m being lazy by not going and looking myself, but I’m going away on holiday in a few days and I have a load of work to do before I go, as well as figure out what to do with a bumper crop of about 30 kilos of greengages which I have had to pick to stop them going over while I’m away. Last year I had about 2 kilos of greengauges from our tree. And that was a record year… so I’m totally unprepared for this mega fruit drop!
So far it’s jam and chutney, but I’m open to ideas!
So
1: when I was faced with an unexpected apple crop a few years ago I made a home brewed sparkling cider which was fun. So maybe it’s time to learn about plum brandy?
2: surge has the following oscillator types we want to expose: classic, modern, sine, fm2, fm3, s&h noise, alias, and string. It also has two wavetable oscillators, ‘wavetable’ and ‘window’. It has two other oscillator types which we don’t need to expose (audio in is pointless and twist is an implementation of plaits which exists elsewhere in vcv)
3: we also have 50 waveshaper models and 20 filter models
4: perhaps after vacation (which I hope you enjoy) playing with the surge vst/au/clap a bit would help?
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Excellent suggestion!
Indeed - hopefully during vacation - I’m sure it will become a lot clearer after that
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Great
This video SURGE XT THE MOVIE : Amazing FREE Synthesizer - Full In-Depth Tutorial - YouTube is a pretty comprehensive overview of xt 1.0. 1.1 (currently in beta) adds a bunch of new things but not in the dsp layer.
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