Rack
Twenty effects. Six slots.
Twelve familiar effects, some of them wired to the Virus TI, and eight the Virus never had.
New in the rack
Eight new tools, each one with its own picture.
Eight effects made for this firmware, each one drawing what it does on the display, so you watch the sound change as you turn the knob. Hyper and Dimension borrow their idea from Serum; the rest are new ground for a hardware rack.
Hyper Serum-inspiredA unison chorus of up to seven voices that thickens a sound into a wide, shimmering wall. Drawn as it moves.
OTTThree-band compression that lifts quiet detail and pulls peaks down: loud, dense and present.
Dimension Serum-inspiredFour short taps spread left and right to widen a sound without smearing it. Safe in mono.
MorphA vowel formant filter you sweep by hand: voices and talking textures from any patch.
FoldA multi-stage wavefolder, with triangle or smooth folds. Turn a plain tone into a harmonic-rich one.
Fract ResFolds the sound smoothly, then rings it through a tuned, damped comb, so rough edges sing at a pitch.
PowerSagThe level of the last moments bends a waveshaper, so loud passages sag and soften, like a supply straining under load.
SinewA slew limiter: each sample may move only so far from the last, so sharp edges round off into glide.
The familiar twelve
Studio staples, with the Virus where it counts.
Delay, Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, Tremolo, Distortion, Wah, Filter, Compressor, Reverb, Bit-crush and EQ.
- Delay and reverb play the settings stored in Virus patches.
- Reverb time and damping follow the Virus TI's tail lengths.
- The EQ is the Virus's own three-band design.
- Chorus and Flanger LFOs include sample and hold and the TI's Wave 3 to 64.
- Tremolo, Wah, Filter, Compressor and Bit-crush are our own designs: the Virus has no such effects, so there is nothing to match.
Your signal path
Sends, inserts and everything between.
Wire up to six effects in the layout you choose, fed from two sends or inserted straight into the synth's sound.
- Layouts: 2 Sends, Serial 2, 3 or 6, 3 + 3, 2 + 2 + 2, Fan 3, Split-Merge and three Insert layouts.
- Quick bypass: hold Oct- and press Right to switch the whole rack off and on again and hear what it adds, with no setting touched.
- Delay and Tremolo can follow the keyboard's tempo.
- Effects share a small memory pool: a reverb takes most of it, so two heavy effects get shorter delays and a smaller reverb. An effect that does not fit stays off.
- Smart sleep: an effect with nothing left to say rests on its own once its tail has faded, and wakes with the next sound, leaving more processor time for the synth.
Acknowledgements
Oscuro's effects were written for this firmware. Where an idea came from somebody else's work, it is named here. No source code was copied into the effects below.
- Sinew and PowerSag are re-implemented after the ideas of the Airwindows plugins of the same names, by Chris Johnson (MIT licence), with different internals.
- OTT follows the well-known upward-and-downward multiband compression idea, studied through the open OTT implementations by Rui-727, Sakhnovkrg (vitOTTx) and Tsarpf. The code here was written from the algorithm, not taken from them.
- Hyper and Dimension borrow their controls and idea from the effects of the same names in Serum, by Xfer Records. They are our own implementations, not copies. Fold is a small wavefolder in the spirit of the one in DaisySP (MIT licence), written from scratch.
- Fract Res, Morph and the other new effects are our own designs.