Still alive...

Some time has passed without any updates again. That's been because there has been enough other stuff happening I guess. Haven't had much to talk about too, because what I've been doing has either been not of general interest, or has been in a phase where it's not ready to be announced, or too damn technical to explain without some effort.

Anyway, situation is that Valo was kinda announced on KVR forums and got some feedback. Then I basically rewrote it's modulation stuff and some minor additions and whatever. Still haven't been making much noise about it though, because I still haven't got a website up for it. The other thing is that I'm currently reconsidering what I'm going to do with it, because I'm not sure if I have time right now to add those features that I would like to see done before I start messing with licenses to people. I'm trying to fix the most critical stuff as soon as possible, but whether I'm going to do a commercial release is open. I'd like to see it used though, so I'm keeping the possibility open that I just release the current version as freeware instead and then do some new stuff in a successor as some stuff wouldn't easily fit in Valo anyway.

In any case I managed to come up with some sort of a tune using (mostly) Valo, which gave me a better perspective of where it is currently. There's definitely a lot of things it could be doing, but at least I'm starting to believe that it actually already fills the initial design goals quite nicely. It can provide me some of the edge, but also warmth, that my previous attempt was incapable of. On the other hand adding the old filter from the previous project as an alternative might be a good idea, because the transistor-ladder-wannabe in Valo cannot quite do some of the sounds that I so liked about the previous project.

I'm going to allocate some more time for DSP development again though. I've got a lot of ideas, but Valo is still my priority, and after that I'm considering a small personal platform of some sort, so I can go faster from quick&dirty prototypes to quality product. This will take some thinking and trying and testing, but I might talk about those things in the future here, since as far as I know, there's not that much audience on this blog that I would alienate.

I'm also thinking of setting up a more generic website to collect and write about some stuff that is really hard to find on the web. Topics would probably fall between music theory, sound design theory and audio signal processing theory. I could write some of the stuff here, but I don't think a blog is necessarily the right format for that, and mixing my personal rants and proper content probably isn't such a great idea. I'm not going to build yet another open community forum though, because we've got enough venues for freeform discussion I think. Rather I'm thinking of focusing on editorial content.

Changes

Things change fast these days. I actually did get some more filter stuff prototyped, thought it wasn't quite up to the job, read some, fixed some, realized I need better oversampling filters, read some more, banged my head to the wall, and mm.. got the whole thing together, and it sounds okayish. I won't be posting sample at this time (that will have to wait), but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

On signal processing front, I'm now trying to figure out how to do hard-clipping without aliasing or huge amounts of oversampling. It turns out that some of the most fun sounds one can get from clipping is with rather loud partials in the high-mid frequency range, and if the sound is otherwise even "cleanish" one can only have tiny amounts of clipping before it starts sounding awful. Anyway, I have an approach in mind, though I won't be giving any details, since it's kinda high-tech stuff, and I wouldn't want somebody else to steal it, yet. ;)

Anyway, that brings us to another thing, which is that things might stall here again, at least on the signal processing front, if not on the music front. I'll try to keep the music alive even if the development stalls, but it kinda seems I might have some new things taking my time in the near future. We'll see. But what I can tell at this point, it does mean I won't be releasing a full-blown synth anytime soon like the plan kinda was. That'll have to wait for now. Depending on things, I might be splitting some of my work into smaller modules, and release those, but suffice to say, I don't have much pressure for it now.

Anyway, I'm still a happy man. Actually happier. I'm kinda feeling like I was 20 again, so much is happening right now, with things rolling in the right directions. Now all that is missing is finding a nice little girl yelling at me for spending the week in front of the screen and the weekend in a bar.

No honestly, I ain't an alcoholic or anything, even if during the last two weeks I've managed to have two hangovers. Neither was that bad though, more like those I had when I was around ... mm.. 20? Haha.

What's going on?

Not much eh?

Well, stuff is going on, even if I've not posted much. I've been doing a couple of things, none of which have been very inspiring from the blogging point of view.

First of all, I've been working and spending time with friends quite a bit, which has been quite refreshing. It seemed certain stuff was very stalled, but now there's more going on around here again, and I'm enjoying all kinds of new experiences I've stumbled across. Could even say, I'm kinda regaining my interest in the so-called "real life" which is probably healthy.

Then there's being going on lots of making of music. Not much to release yet, I think. I'm thinking of building a larger set of material together first, then releasing some sort of EP maybe.. I don't know. But I'm also learning a lot of new stuff with music, things I've not really even been interested before, which is lots of fun, but the results aren't really that great yet, so it'll take a while before anyone else gets to enjoy. Maybe I'll talk about that in some later post, so we'll get a bit less inactivity here.

Then there's been some writing of code. Not much has resulted from that yet, since it's largely been of the research variety. I'm finally quite happy (that's probably an understatement) with my basic model of a saw-core analog oscillator, and I'm looking forward to prototype some wave-shaping to derive triangle and sine from that core in a somewhat similar way that a real analog oscillator module would do. I have the theory laid out already, so it's really just a matter of finishing some math and writing some code at this point. Then I've been doing some more extensive research with filters, unfortunately not quite as much as I'd liked to, though. Got some theory to prototype on that front as well.

Oh and then there's some other stuff, and plans that get delayed, and whatever. Hopefully things will advance in the near future again.