There’s still a lot of interest in the Virus TI series, so I was thinking it might be nice to have a dedicated VIRUS TIPS & TRICKS thread. I would personally benefit greatly from such a thread, as the synth is so incredibly deep with tons of interesting sound design potential, and it would be helpful and fun to hear what people are doing with it.
I’m in no way a master, but I’ll start us out with a fairly basic tip on how to get an extra snappy, performance-oriented filter envelope:
Set FILTER BALANCE to 0.
Set Filter 1 CUTOFF to 0.
Set Filter 2 OFFSET to 0.
Set LFO 2 to modulate CUTOFF 1+2.
Set LFO 2 modulation to around 100%.
Set LFO 2 SHAPE to Sawtooth.
Set LFO 2 ENVELOPE MODE to ‘On’.
Set LFO 2 CLOCK to ‘Off’.
Use SHIFT + RATE to set LFO CONTOUR to -64 (to make the sawtooth wave concave)
Now, as you turn up the RATE of LFO 2, the sound gets more snappy.
Bonus addition to patch
Set Delay to “Tape Clocked”
Set Left Clock to 4/16
Set Right Clock to 3/16
Set SEND to taste
Activate Arpeggiator
Add some Phaser to taste
Go to town.
While it’s arpeggiating, I like to manually modulate LFO Contour, Rate, as well as the Cutoff and Resonance. When doing filter sweeps with all this going, you can land on some really pleasing sonic sweet spots while the stereo offset delay is bouncing back and forth.
[Edit: Initially I was only using filter 1, but it seems to work better with both filters engaged.]
No longer have a Virus (sadly) but on the TI models don’t overlook the hypersaws as only being useful for supersaw sounds. If you set the hypersaw to a single voice you get a much more defined (less aliasing, brighter) saw sound than the classic oscillator. If you set the hypersaw to a single voice and turn the sub oscillator all the way up you get a very powerful square (also a different flavor than the classics oscs).
Pretty basic tip, but I recommend checking out the stomp box models in the fx section. Mint, curry, etc. They sound amazing and can turn ordinary patches into weird industrial pseudo-acoustic thonks, especially in combination with some reverb or other modulation.
Just for those who don’t have the budget/space for a Virus, there are excellent emulators and the firmware has been released to the public so it’s 100% legal now
What I meant was that the Virus firmware still appears to be officially available only to Virus hardware owners through the Access site.
The firmware is required to use the excellent Usual Suspects plugins.
The DSP bridge does seems pretty interesting.
I probably won’t ever have any use for it but it seems like a very clever use for a second machine.
Edit: Sorry, I just realised this was supposed to be a Virus TI tips thread, not the Ostirus discussion.
An actual tip from “The Usual Suspects” reverse engineering.
Load Balancing
We had lots of ideas how the load is distributed among two DSPs. However, as the serial communication lines for both DSPs are tied, there is no option for the microcontroller to talk to one DSP only. Everything that gets sent by the microcontroller is sent to both DSPs.
Our initial idea was that voices are evenly distributed across both DSPs, but it is even simpler:
In Single Mode, only one DSP is used
In Multi Mode, one DSP plays all odd parts, the other one all even parts
The microcontroller doesn’t do anything here. Its on the DSP side, one DSP ignores Midi for all even parts and the other one ignores Midi for all odd parts, it is really as simple as that.
So, as a conclusion, a tip for all TI owners: For maximum voice count, distribute your used presets in Sequencer Mode or Multi Mode equally on even and odd parts.
Howard Scarr - a pro sound designer, who did patches for many synths - released the tutorial “Programming Analogue Synths”, which not only sets focus on the Virus, it explains methods to achieve various timbres - classical and more.
BUT - he also explains some less known techniques like “recursive modulation”. This can - as an example - be used to create more snappy envelopes.
