GrooveWear
TL;DW: Scrubbing highs off mechanically like a stylus would.
Here’s something interesting! I revisited some pieces of ToVinyl4, one of ’em being GrooveWear. In fiddling with it, I discovered that I could put in a dedicated wet/dry for just that one part, and if I did, I got perfect high-frequency rolloff at 50%. In other words, as an effect it was working as intended (bit of overshoot available, like the needle was loose in the groove), but I could also redesign it as a tone-softener.
It’s all based on variations of averaging. I’ve got Average to soften just only sample values (it has some interesting quirks but I swear by that algorithm for naturally rolling off highs in a way that doesn’t sound digital). GrooveWear goes one step beyond that, and averages slews (not sample values). That means it’s averaging the rate of change. Then, later (and will be coming to VST) I did Aura, which is averaging the rate of change OF the rate of change… but that’s another story ;)
More importantly, I came up with a nice feature doing the revision. The GrooveWear contained in ToVinyl uses two stages of processing, since it can be a subtle effect. I worked out a convenient way to make the dry/wet control handle multiple stages so, as you increase it, you’re progressively adding stage after stage with the final stage going from dry to wet: it means you can start off with a very mathematically clean amount of effect, just one stage dry/wet, and then keep adding more. And in the spirit of that, I doubled the stages so now GrooveWear has four.
So, you can adjust the intensity control that specifies how much slew averaging the stages are doing (acts like a sort of frequency range control for the effect) or you can adjust the dry/wet to go from pristine to incredibly deep groove wear. It’s partly roll-off of the highs but it’s not JUST normal EQ, texturally it’s quite different because the effect doesn’t try to stop big transients like a square-wave’s sides, it tries to stop smaller-scale detail stuff while retaining the big harmonic content of waves. It’s averaging slew, not deleting it, so certain waveforms get through untouched… you’ll see.
Patreon is doing nicely which makes me happy: as you can see, when I start to get resources I do things like try to make Eurorack modules for people, and I’ve been super busy thinking up ways to do that which are (a) cool and (b) people can do for very little cost. That seems the best thing, and I’ve discovered some great tips and tricks and things. More on that later.
I’m also keeping an eye on the VCV Rack open-source virtual modular project: music made entirely in it seems not quite as good as hardware modular synth music. It’s almost like the modules and digital mixing in there could benefit from adding modules for making digital mixing sound more analog-like, stuff which can handle/elicit more in the way of warmth and vibe and depth and space and stuff.
I might just be able to help with that one ;)
Hey Chris cool plug! Sounds really “deep” :D I was wondering, i heard you talking about the averaging to the slew that worked similiar to the plugin average with the nodes but you said it where sort if average dealing up to 19 nodes sort of? Does this plugin go down to 3-4khz? Cuz i often find those are the problematic spots in my mixing and mastering that i deal the most with.
Awesome. Thanks!
“It’s averaging slew, not deleting it, so certain waveforms get through untouched”
This sounds like something I was trying to accomplish with some noisy drum samples using Photoshop and GIMP and even Fiji / ImageJ by importing them as a long 16-bit 1px tall monochrome bitmap. Anisotropic diffusion seemed alright, though I couldn’t control the settings and it made some strange tonal artifacts in the lower mids. To try and fix that and mostly target the changes in amplitude I thought would contain most of the undesirable noise I used the difference between the anisotropic diffusion and the original image, solarized it so black and white both are black and grey (a difference of 0) stays grey and I could adjust the contrast into a black and white mask selecting both pixels that define an edge, then I think I used a highpassed copy of the original image to remove the slower gradual changes and keep the high frequences and then blurred that a little so really fine details almost disappear into the grey background but larger changes in level are still visible, then curves adjustment to make the taretted contrast area white and the rest black for a mask, and used that in combination with the edge mask to fade in an anisotropic diffused copy of the original image onto the areas of somewhat specific amplitude change.
This is probably going to sound better than my weird image editing tests. Looking forward to Aura as well.
This thing paints the most beautiful and non digital sounding 2-5kHz range (and even higher and lower) I have ever heard in the box. This plugin is so solid. Unbelievable. Again. Thank You.
@Jacob
That’s a heroic workflow! Hope it worked (or you find something easier…)