Why does Resonance up = volume down?

[bobglanville]

Hi, can you help?
When I turn up the resonance on a TI desktop patch, the volume of the patch goes down.
Why is this? Is there a limiter somewhere I need to switch off?

I want those resonant top ends to rip my head off, not retreat at the sound of their own voice!

Any thoughts or ideas would be gratefully received.
Thanks!
Bob

[Timo]

This is purely a guess but I imagine that, because the synth is digital, the other frequencies may be attenuated respectively in order that the sound wont clip and distort, given that resonance is normally summed on top of the audio signal.

The overall output level still remains the same.

You can use the filter saturation if you wish to have the option of soft limiting across all freqs with a little further enhancement and bite of the resonance to smooth things out a touch.

Furthermore, remember you have two filters, available in a multitude of different combinations. You can set one filter to use no resonance (and therefore wont be attenuated when you sweep it) and set the other filter to use resonance, and then mix them together in parallel or similar for the full bandwidth sound you require.

Of course, if you want resonance to rip your head off, use both saturation in the filter section along with distortion in the effects section. Add some Filter Envelope and other variations to modulate the filter and bring it to life.

Hope this helps.

[bobglanville]

Hi Timo,
Thanks for the quick and very helpful reply, and thanks for the link to the filter schematics.
I am a novice with the TI. How do I get the filter to saturate as you suggested? Is that something that happens naturally? It sounds exciting.

Thanks and hope you're having a great weekend.
Bob

[Timo]

Originally Posted by bobglanville

I am a novice with the TI. How do I get the filter to saturate as you suggested? Is that something that happens naturally? It sounds exciting.

It doesn't happen naturally, you have to enable saturation in the filter menus. You have different types and variations of saturation available - light, soft, medium, hard, digital (clipping), rectifying, etc.

The manual will probably explain it better than I can.

Once you have saturation enabled (have a play with the medium, or hard saturation types to start with), the Osc Vol knob (in the Mix section) turns into 'drive' mode, meaning the more you twist it to the right, the more you're overdriving the filter and its saturation. The more drive you have, and the more resonance you have, the more it will rip and scream when you play with the cutoff, especially if you have the distortion from the effects section enabled too. Watch your ears.

If you also use the Filter Envelope to modulate the filter, you can make the usual distorted TB303-esque type stuff.

Some filter saturation types work better with some sounds than others. In other cases it can be counter productive and flattens the sound. It's a case of going through them and becoming accustomed to what sort of sounds they each work best on. Not only that, but with each filter type and configuration too.

The Virus filters have great flexibility.

Thanks and hope you're having a great weekend.
Bob

Thanks, you too.

[TweakHead]

On some instruments like Logic's ES1 and ES2 there's the "fat" filter, the only one where this doesn't happen as the fundamental timbre is reintroduced into the routing despite high values of resonance. Think it's a digital only thing though, as feedback loop in an analogue device will produce very different sounding results.

[Timo]

Originally Posted by TweakHead

On some instruments like Logic's ES1 and ES2 there's the "fat" filter, the only one where this doesn't happen as the fundamental timbre is reintroduced into the routing despite high values of resonance. Think it's a digital only thing though, as feedback loop in an analogue device will produce very different sounding results.

I really would like to see some new emulated and creative filter types on the Virus' in future. They're the single most, biggest things that can dramatically and radically alter the sound, giving the synth entirely new flavours, effectively a new synth each time.

[TweakHead]

Originally Posted by Timo

I really would like to see some new emulated and creative filter types on the Virus' in future. They're the single most, biggest things that can dramatically and radically alter the sound, giving the synth entirely new flavours, effectively a new synth each time.

What do you have in mind? I think the "analogue" filter mode is still very lush sounding even compared to "zero feedback latency" technology you see implemented on recent products. To my mind, it's one of the things Access got right from the beginning even! It's hard to find a digital synthesizer whose filters are flexible enough to get the creamy, warm or scream textures and excel in every department!

With the addition of the Vowel and Comb filters and the "Variable" ones I think they're pretty much up-to-date on that department! Just would like to see them implement Filter FM and some emulation of feedback circuitry - even though the saturation on Filter Stage pretty much manages to achieve similar results.

Would love if they decided to extend the range of the LFO's rate into audio territory, better still, full range oscillators would come handy and certainly enable us to explore new sonic territory, like more complex FM patches for example. This coupled with the "still today very unique" selectable waves for both OSC and LFO on the Virus (wonder why so many instruments only feature the most basic wave shapes for LFOs...) would make the Virus capable of virtually everything. One step further with user customizable waveforms and some sort of step sequencing thing, could be multi-stage and loop capable envelopes (or custom curves like you see on Massive) and they'd probably get the investment back by hitting on a market where Zebra and Massive and such things rule alone, for the weird modulation hunger folks in many EDM genres very popular today! On top of that, it's pretty much how it started: the Virus has always been known as a very versatile machine with tons of modulation options you hardly find anywhere else and with a couple of tweaks in the design it could very well catch up even with the latest incarnations of software synthesis. Sure enough the investment is smaller on the software side and things get complicated when retro compatibility is a factor. To my mind, they could circumvent this problem the same way they did for the filters: classic mode and selectable new modes. This could be done for the LFO section as well.