There has been a big thread on electro-music.com about the G2's filters and that they sound too clean (which seems to be the opposite from "Moogish"). If you don't like the G2 filters, you can call yourself happy, because on a modular system you can build your own filters. Find basic tips in the toolbox by searching for "filter" in the search box to your left. Find much more in-depth information in the filter section of Rob Hordijk's workshop. The whole thread can be found here. Below are excerpts of what I found the most interesting.
I have used the 'Filter Lowpass' module which has no resonance control, this is not a problem because I take the output of the filter through an inverter and overdrive (distortion) module, and feed it back into two of the mixer inputs (to get up to 2 times gain). The resonance produced this way is a lot less well behaved than on the other filters and has a lot of variation depending on the settings of the overdrive.
Of course it can't sound fat without a lot of high harmonic content at the input. I have used two paired oscillators (paired because the squares are the same frequency as the sawtooths, in a digital system that means they are locked like a square from the same oscillator). The idea is to add a little square to 'simulate' 2nd harmonic distortion of the sawtooth. You could use two oscillators with an overdrive each but that would cost more dsp. The input is intended for bass sounds.
The filter is set to a 30dB slope which is higher than most analogue filters can do, try changing to lower slopes which will allow more harmonics through at the same roll off frequency.
g2ian attached a patch to illustrate this. The below patch is the same one but I coloured it a little bit:
This is what Rob Hordijk wrote: "Here is a classic pad made with the LP. The filter is made resonant with the same trick as Ian uses, inverted feedback. Asymmetrical distortion is added in the resonance feedback patch by using a classic VCA trick: applying a little of the VCA input signal to a fixed control voltage that by default sets the VCA to unity gain. The polarity of that added signal is important, normally it needs to be inverted. But as it receives this signal after the inverter that is used for the resonance feedback it is all pretty dsp cheap and neat. On unison sounds the asymmetric distortion cannot be really deep, though on a single sawtooth it can be much deeper. But with too much VCA modulation the filter will clamp, so don't overdo. It is best if the effect is just subtle, just like it would be on a quality analog filter.
Imho this is a good one to study, as it is almost a classbook example on how to build an analog sounding DIY filter. And it is cheap enough to do a five VCO sound with fifteen voices plus reverb on an unexpanded G2. "
(This patch sounds so "analog" because: "It would never have occurred to me to modulate the double saw with a saw lfo like that. With the lfo rate/keyboard morph, you get to break up the (perceived) beat relationship because the lfo rate tracks differently from the actual detuned oscillator beating. Just like a real analogue polysynth with no cost at all in DSP cycles."(g2ian))
36dbfilter.pch2 |
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 14 May 2006 )
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