Baron Cimitière - digidrums custom unit

[hyena]

repository for all things Baron Cimitière:

hyena666/Baron-Cimitiere

(thats because now B C is a multiplatform digidrums app! er-301 .unit file, max\msp patch with monome grid support and internal sequencer and upcoming max for live device)

here we go!

ER-301 Custom Unit version

Baron Cimitière is a sine-based digital percussion unit.
send it some gates, cvs, stepped or fluctuating randoms and hear it spit out sharp beats.

controls are:
-Gate - trigger it manually or send it whatever you want
-A decay - decay\release control for amplitude
-FB - amount of sine self modulation
-Pitch - the Baron is tuned to C by default but you can mess with it here
-P decay - decay\release control for pitch (useful to create the transient part)
-P env amt - pitch envelope amount (tip: short p decay : high amt, long p decay : low amount)
-Int PM - phase modulation index (more internal phase modulation = more harmonics)
-PM pitch - tuning for the internal sine modulator
-Dist - amount of distortion
-P curve - positive values for log pitch decays, negative values for expo pitch decays

Max\Msp version

I then ported the custom unit in Max 8. I’m learning Max in the very moment of patching this app so you’ll see some probably unelegant and unefficient solutions but i managed to do it!
Actual 0.5.0 version sports internal sequencer and monome grid 128 varibright support for hands on experience!

In the max version i added an internal sequencer made of three rows:

• main sequencer: where you trigger the envelopes controlling amplitude and pitch

• pm sequencer: where you trigger the envelope controlling phase modulation

• dist sequencer: where you trigger the envelope controlling tanh~ distortion
  You can then independently randomize the position of the playhead on all three sequencers, you can randomize the phase modulation oscillator frequency to main oscillator frequency ratio and the amount of distortion.

Two versions are available: 8 steps and 16 steps. The GUI’s are different too.

I’m working on a proper max for live device.

have fun!

here some little demos:

[phonk]

<3 <3

[vasquez]

Awesome!

[Joe]

@hyena this is awesome, thank you! Congrats on the first custom unit shared in 0.4. And the demo sounds great too!

Couple of questions. My copy seems to be missing the A decay control, which seems important. Just me?

The P decay control seems to have some kind of breakpoint that I wouldn’t expect. In your default set up it’s set to 450ms. If I bump it up to 460ms, it seems to add a lot more than 10ms. Values lower than 450ms don’t really seem to have any noticeable difference. Any ideas?

[ether]

Oh hell yes!

[mudlogger]

Awesome, thanks for sharing - will wait to try as I’m still on 0.3 for upcoming gigs

[hyena]

thanks guys
A decay: this is very strange, i’ll look into it!
P decay: this is i think normal behaviour because the result of P decay depends a lot on the P curve parameter.
this is the part i’m least happy with, the p curve controls a bipolar vca after the adsr feedback on both decay and release parameter of the pitch envelope.
to create log\lin\exp curves i do it like this: i use two mixer channels, one with the P decay offset, one with the adsr feedback. it works but it’s not perfect, still have to find the best way to achieve this!

thanks for testing and your kind words, people!

[Joe]

Ah, ok. I thought maybe you accidentally posted a prior version (thus the missing a decay control) and that the p decay might have not been fully programmed. Yeah, sounds quite tricky to change the response of the slope,

[hyena]

All suggestions welcome! Max msp version and max for live version coming too!the supercollider version will prolly be the best but that is still far

[Joe]

Not sure if it’s helpful but if I go into edit controls, here’s what I see:

I can’t click/edit the one that says “open ?” but I assume it’s the missing A Decay control. However I can find a reference to the A Decay control in an ADSR inside the unit. Is anyone else seeing this or do I just need to re-download?

One possible suggestion: I’ve gone back and forth on my “ER-301 unit design philosophy” with this kind of thing. What I found myself wanting to do with Baron Cimitière was to use some external EGs with this. O_c piqued and Zadar. But I don’t think there’s a way to plug those in without doing a bit of a rebuild. So one idea might be simply have an amp env and pitch env control at the top level that are pre-wired to the VCAs, and perhaps with some ADSRs in their subchains ready to go.

I dunno, like I said, I’ve gone back and forth with this. Currently I’m on a “lets make it as easy as possible to plug in external stuff” kick as opposed to a “lets make this a completely self contained instrument” kick. But thought I’d share the sentiment and see what thoughts you and others have.

[hyena]

yah, i think with some clever VCA and mixer units we can decide wether using internal or external modulations!
anyway, thanks for finding out! the A decay disappeared! as @rbeny pointed out in the other thread this is definitely a bug. i created that control and saved it with the custom unit. now i load it and it’s gone!!! @odevices i think we definitely have “the mistery of disappearing custom controls”

[hyena]

until the problem with disappearing controls gets solved here’s the max\msp version of it (with internal sequencer):
Baron Cimitière 0.2.maxpat.zip (8.1 KB)

here how it sounds:

here some pictures:

[mah]

(we need a version of this smiley with heart shaped ears instead of eyes)

[odevices]

The ER-301 version sounds better to me.

[hyena]

But,of course!!!

[chapelierfou]

Thanks for posting ! I am somehow more used to Max so I can « read » the patching better. Need to get back to my Er 301 !

[hyena]

first max for live version, i have to swap all the max objects with live. objects in order to be able to do automations from live… and the text is too small…i will refine it:
http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/5070/baron-cimitiere

[hyena]

Baron Cimitiere.unit (44.5 KB)

new version, requires 0.4.06 , disappearing custom controls fixed, A decay is back in town

EDIT: fixed also in orginal download (post 1)

[hyena]

everything will now be posted in this github repo (sorry i’m just learning how to use github, the readme file is terrible,i know):

hyena666/Baron-Cimitiere

[Unity2k]

Love that this is up on Github as I just grabbed the freshly baked 7 hour old version!