search

LMMS / lmms

Cross-platform music production software
https://lmms.io
GNU General Public License v2.0
8.18k stars 1.01k forks source link

Add TAL Noisemaker's filters for their awesome sound #2844

Open unfa opened 8 years ago

unfa commented 8 years ago

I made this issue in ZynAddSubFX tracker: https://sourceforge.net/p/zynaddsubfx/feature-requests/82/

Here's what I wrote:

I don't know what's it about TAL Noisemaker's filters but I just love the sound they produce. They sound so fat and lively, analogue like. They are full of chartacter, not just blantly manipulatuing the sound spectrum as they are expected, but also imprinting a unique character to the sound. I haven't heard any other (commercial or opensource) software instrument to have such awesome-sounding filters. Just the hardware Moogs sound similar to my ears, but I never played too much with them on my own.

Before I started using TAL Noisemaker, I never really understood, why some people praise synths so much just for their filters. "Filter is just a filter" I thought. Now I finally see that they can sound differently.

I've found the source files for those filters, they are released under GPL, so can be legaly used in ZynAddSubFX. Here they are, among other .h files: https://sourceforge.net/p/tal-noisemak3r/code/HEAD/tree/src/Engine/

If you don't know me, I've used Zyn for many years now, produced a few full-length albums with 99% ZynAddSubFX, and played some live shows with it too. I know the sound of it pretty well, and I appreciate the different types of filters there are availabile (regular ones and state-variable sound the most different to me -especialy on transients). I'd love so much to see these TAL filters there too availabile.

What is more, those TAL filters are 4x oversampled and self-oscillating on high resonance values. I don't know why but it doesn't sound to me like a regular sine-wave oscillator.

Then I realised LMMS has some cool filters implemented (Moogs!) and TAL filters could be a great addition to that.

I asked Togu Audio Line why these filters sound so good.

What I got in reply was this: careful tuning (whatever that means - choosing cutoff frequencies for different poles?), random instabilities, non-linearity. You can hear that they generate noise. They were modelled after Moog ladder filter architecture.

I started using TAL NoizeMak3r more and more partially for the awesome filters (and evelopes!).

The NoiseMaker's sourcecode is here, GPLd and ready to use :) https://sourceforge.net/p/tal-noisemak3r/code/HEAD/tree/src/Engine/

PaulBatchelor commented 8 years ago

Looking at the comments, the filters seem to be based off the moogladder opcode in Csound: http://www.csounds.com/manual/html/moogladder.html, but they have added jitter to some of the controls. I have ported this particular opcode to Soundpipe, and the code can be found here: https://github.com/PaulBatchelor/Soundpipe/blob/master/modules/moogladder.c