A Bank of Max For Live Oscillators - revisited

When I created BankOSCmr0v01, I thought that it was quite a neat, simple multi-oscillator sound generator, and so I released it into the wild...

After a bug report, followed by careful investigations by myself, Ableton and Cycling'74, it looks like  we could not reliably generate the problem, and so I went back to playing with it and seeing where this took me - which is where it started to get really interesting...

The problem with large numbers of oscillators is always one of control. Additive synthesis suffers from this because there are lots of harmonics that you need to control. BankOSCmr has 32 oscillators, and so suffers from similar problems, although I was determined not to do a traditional 'separate envelope for each oscillator' and I was equally focussed on not going anywhere near the standard FFT-based 'draw a response' approach either - the beauty of having 32 separate oscillators with a few Hertz resolution across the audio band is that you have a very different audio palette to FFT-based generators. (Plus I have already done a couple of those!)

BankOSCmr0v03f

So I played around with logical extensions of what I already had, and this rapidly expanded into the control method that is in BankOSC0v03f. The main new additions are the Freq and Volume 'damping' controls, and these affect the way that the density of the oscillator frequencies and volumes are affected by the scanning across the oscillators. Low values of damping create thick clusters of frequencies, whilst high values of damping give more open, thin whips of frequencies. I also added a timed 'Update' function, which resets the frequencies and volumes of the oscillators to random values, just to add a bit of variety in how the oscillators can be controlled. You can also click on the 'New' (at the top of the Van De Graaf) to force a new set of random values for the oscillators.

And it was great fun. The additions allow a lot more control over the sound pallete that BankOSCmr could create, and widened the possible sounds as well. In fact, it felt like you could almost use it for performance as it was, and so I put it through 3rd hand, the automatic volume fader, and just played around for 12 minutes or so, capturing it on video.

The result is available on YouTube.

The (Updated) video demo of BankOSCmr0v03f was recorded live, and the only effect is Zynaptiq's superb free SubSpace plug-in to add a bit of spatial variety (If I could afford it, then I would be using their astonishingly wonderful Adaptiverb instead, which I fell in love with at NAMM, and which comes incredibly highly recommended by me!). 3rd Hand is just an automatic volume control. In more skilled hands than mine, then the demo would be better, and there's a few warts in the audio (this is version 0v03 remember!), but this was my first time putting everything together of a live video demo... and now I have added better text commentary...

So what's going on in the demo? Well, the Update time is set to just under 15 seconds, so there's a bit of timed underpinning in the background for much of the time, although I do turn it off, and then back on again, just to show how this is simple to do. Then I just explore the various controls. High and Low set the range of frequencies generated by the 32 oscillators, whilst the Time sets how long it takes for each oscillator to change frequency, so you can go from very quick jumps, to very slow glides. Freq and Volume control the damping, and the Run control sets how quickly the scan runs across the oscillators. Fill has two functions: above 0.1s it just generates ramp functions, whilst below that it generates random values. The ramps allow the generation of some very cool Shepard tones, as you can hear in the middle part of the demo. The random values can give some astonishing bell-like timbres, again in the middle of the demo. At the end, I break with convention, and keep altering things as the fade out progresses. One of my more commercial songs introduced a blistering lead solo just after half way through the final fade, just so that anyone who was listening got the feeling that there was more - kind of the reverse of Roxy Music's intro to Virginia Plain (Sound of lots of people looking this up on iTunes and Spotify...).

What intrigues me is that there are lots of videos on the Interweb that show people playing Modular synths live and 'DAW-less', whilst I haven't been able to find very many that show an Ableton Live plug-in being played live, sans any sequencing or pre-recorded backing. Well, now there is one. Enjoy!

Getting BankOSCmr0v03f

You can download BankOSCmr0v03f for free from MaxForLive.com.

Here are the instructions for what to do with the .amxd file that you download from MaxforLive.com:

     https://synthesizerwriter.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/where-do-i-put-downloaded-amxd.html

(In Live 10, you can also just double-click on the .amxd file, but this puts the device in the same folder as all of the factory devices...)

Adaptiverb...

Adaptiverb is incredibly highly recommended, and comes from Zynaptiq.

Modular Equivalents

In terms of modular equivalents, then reproducing this functionality in my modulars either involved 32 VCOs and four 8-step sequencers, or advanced oscillators banks or sequencers that I can't count as 'basic' modules, so I would rate this version as being about 46 ME (or 12ME if bank oscillators are allowed, or 8ME with fancy sequencers!).

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Slow fades in live performance...

3rd Hand was inspired by a ‘drone’ concert that I attended. The opening ‘build’ took about 10 minutes, and was astonishingly effective - there’s something about a big sound that starts out quiet and gradually gets louder and louder! So I wondered how to do this in Ableton Live, and 3rd Hand is the result…

3rd Hand is a timed volume control. You press the ‘Up’ button and the volume goes up. You press the ‘Down’ button and the volume goes down. If you change your mind, then pressing the button again reverses the direction! You can set the time that it takes to go from silence to full volume from a few seconds to over 45 minutes. Yep, three quarters (fourths) of an hour. (For people who like to really let something build at its own pace…)

Because 3rd Hand is a volume control, then the first control, labelled ‘Output’ is a… volume control. It lets you set the maximum output, and has quite a lot of gain for maximum flexibility. Just set the Up time to a short time and press the ‘Up’ button, and wait until you get to the 100% ’Maximum volume’ level, and then adjust the Output control to the loudest you want to reach. 3rd Hand alters the volume of anything that you pass through it, so you should put it at the end of your effects processing chain.

The Up and Down time controls have a big range. Note that they don't have normal parameters shown underneath - instead the parameters are shown ABOVE the rotary controls. You can see this by altering the rotary controls - The Minutes and Seconds should change. If nothing seems to be happening when you press the Up/Down button, then make sure that the ‘M’ setting isn’t several minutes… The bug reports that I got from the beta versions were mostly along the lines of: ‘Doesn’t work. No output.’, followed by ‘Ah, I see!’ later on when they found that ‘M’ means minutes (and ’S’ means seconds).

There are four states. Starting from zero volume, they are:

Zero Volume. 
Ready to Fade up. Press the 'Up' button to start fading upwards from zero.

Fading Up. 

Note that the button has changed to 'Down', so you can press this at any time to abort the fade up, and 3rd Hand will fade the volume back to zero again. If you don't press the 'Down' button, then the fade up will just continue upwards.

Maximum Volume. 
The fade will slow down and stop as it gets to 100%. Note that the 'Down' button is still available, so you can fade down now if you want, or leave it at Maximum volume for as long as you like... You can think of the Max volume state as 'Ready to Fade Down'...

Fading Down.
The fade down gradually slows as it gets near zero volume. Note that as soon as the fade downwards starts, the button changes to 'Up, so that you can abort the fade down (if you pressed the button by mistake, foe instance) at any time.

 When the fade down is complete, we are back in the 'Zero Volume' state, where we started.

And that's mostly it. 3rd Hand is probably the most sophisticated simple device you have seen, but it is intended to do it properly, reliably and flexibly.

Because just changing the volume is a bit limited, the remainder of the device is a standard parameter mapping controller. You use the big ‘Map’ button to choose a parameter in Live that you want to control, and the you adjust the ‘Depth’ to set how much effect it will have on the parameter, with maybe some Offset added. You can invert the way the parameter follows the volume change - Normal tracks the volume, Invert goes the opposite way. So, for example, you could start out with lots of revert and gradually remove it as the volume grows, or pan from one sid to the other, or add chorus/echo as the volume rises… Whatever works in context - I'm sure you can find something awesome to control as the volume builds...

3rd Hand is meant to be used in live performance - in the above example, it is being used to control the output of BankOSCmr 0v02, which kind of fits the 'drone' genre I mentioned right at the start of this blog post. You could use it otherwise, of course. (One immediate thought is to have one 3rd Hand on several tracks and to use them to bring stuff in and out slowly.) Anyway, enjoy big slow builds!

Getting 3rd Handperf_a_mr0v01

You can download 3rdHandperf_a_mr0v01 for free from MaxForLive.com.

Here are the instructions for what to do with the .amxd file that you download from MaxforLive.com:

https://synthesizerwriter.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/where-do-i-put-downloaded-amxd.html

Modular Equivalents

In terms of modular equivalents, then reproducing this simple functionality in my modulars involved 2 VCAs and an Envelope Generator, plus a Button trigger, and a Utility voltage processor, so I would rate this version as being about 5 ME.

Buy me a coffee