With Aalto and Kaivo presets I start unplugging cables one by one (usually from right to left lol) until I’ve stripped it down to minimal functionality. And tweak as I start plugging them back in.
Yeah, it’s not an ‘immediate joy’ synth for me either, like the other Madrona stuff has been. Also it absolutely punishes my old computer, which has put me off using it a lot. I think its strengths are going to lie in using Vutu to make partial maps and then mucking with the resynthesis. But I’m happy to own it after the fairly long development period.
what I’d really like to see is some tutorials that take maybe each module and explore a bit of sound design with some basic elements. it’s so easy and fast to stack complexity, that it can get unwieldily to understand exactly what you’re doing. I quite like plugins or synths where you load up an init patch and then find those few controls that do something quirky and spend time learning the tools that way. What’s super interesting about Sumu, is that all the patch cables are like virtual 64 channel cable looms, with loads of info getting sent through them. Building some vanilla patches and then just cascading all that multi ch info is mind boggling in itself.
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One of my criticisms of it is that some cables actually aren’t multichannel (pitch and gate for instance), and there’s no visual indicator of the difference. The only way to know which ones are is to RTFM, or use the scope to test them (even then it shows a multichannel signal but with all channels the same value, so it seems to upgrade a single channel signal when connected to a multichannel input).
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Not sure if it’s Black Friday sale or something.
Currently $129
https://madronalabs.com/products/sumu
(just for the record, i am interested but not for another year perhaps)
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it’s still the intro sale but also i think because V 1.0 was released.
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Sumu just got an update to v1.1. I just happened to notice a quick video on YT about it, otherwise I’d have had no idea.
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They only just sent a newsletter about it yesterday. It’s still a bit wonky from the looks of things, and no CPU optimisations yet.
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Nice to see they are still iterating on it. Early versions did not grab me so much (and I am hardware oriented anyway) but they are definitely working to push boundaries and try out new ideas. I’m going to give it another look!
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Great and fun Plugin if you are into experimental music.
Here are some examples I came up with (SUMU only)
I use Fors.fm Opal CTL to P-Lock and modulate some parameters on these (elektron style :D)
The first one is one instance of Sumu, the second one has two instances running in parallel. It is definitely CPU hungry, but on my macbook pro M4 I can run three instances a the same time without issues.
You can see them on my instagram in case you are interested
https://www.instagram.com/p/DP9auSrDA2F/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
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v1.2.0 was released earlier this week. Has some decent CPU savings, though it’s still pretty heavy.
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More specifics on the gains:
Installers: Madrona Labs Sumu
There’s also a new “Team Notes” post where they’re discussing the more technical aspects of how they’re making improvements and doing development for those of the geekish inclination:
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8 voices!? He must be running it on a Cray mainframe or something…
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Build your own Cray cluster on the cheap!
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https://youtube.com/live/ayGzHlRijyQ
this synth!!!
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