So the new firmware is a few weeks off. Let’s spend the waiting time on a new Syntakt Science Lab Special!
This lab focuses on making the FX track sing.
As you all know, it’s possible to make the delay self-oscillate. By balancing the feedback amount carefully, it’s even possible to both make sustained sounds. Let’s find out what happens when this feedback is governed by locks, run through the reverb, the delay, the FX track filter, through both, played manually and so on.
Rules:
No regular track sounds allowed, apart from one track of UT-IMPULSE to kick off the feedback
As usual, no external processing apart from normalization. Let’s see what the Syntakt can muster on its own.
Please post any info that might be relevant to your recording, like how you routed the signals, what was sequenced and/or played live.
Please post a project file so that others can analyse and investigate. As always, the main goal of this is learning and sharing
I’m sure you will! An example: Start by setting the delay to a short time, feedback slightly into self-oscillation, go to the FX track and enter some p-locks for the delay time. Then filter the delay with the FX filter, run it trough reverb etc etc… fun (and noisy) times
Ha. Never occurred to me you could do basic Karplus-Strong on the ST but I suppose I should have worked it out what with the delay being able to FB 100%+.
I have a video from 2024 that covers the topic of this SSL.
I don’t remember what was used for the ping, but I definitely pressed the key only once - the rest is FX sound.
The sound was adjusted manually. The goal was to record noinput speedcore =)
Here are my first experiments. Not much to say really. Delay at shortest interval mostly, and always processed through the FX track filter. A few trigless trigs and locks to reverb time, delay time, filtering, LFO division.
It’s really cool to have filters for both reverb and delay, as well as the FX track filter itself.
It’s definitely possible to get wilder than this. Will try some more.
Every little part can be a super interesting effect in DAW arrangement, but as solo composition i prefer two: 2nd is rhythmic and 3rd have voice-like timbre. Great!
the Karplus-Strong observation is the interesting one here. what’s happening in that self-oscillating delay is basically the same algorithm - you’re exciting a feedback loop with a short burst (the impulse) and the loop length determines the pitch. Karplus-Strong adds a lowpass filter inside the loop to damp higher harmonics over time, which is what gives plucked string sounds their natural decay character. the Syntakt’s FX filter sitting in the chain is doing something very similar.
i’ve been spending time lately messing around with implementing stuff like this from scratch in JUCE - just for the joy of it, building simple DSP things to understand them properly - and it completely changes how you approach hardware. when you’ve hand-rolled a comb filter you start hearing feedback delays differently everywhere. what Nils is doing here is genuinely the same synthesis principle, just arrived at from the hardware side rather than from code. love this lab for exactly this reason.
I wanted to see if I could do it without any kind of ping. So I turned the FX Drive all the way up to maximum. The delay and reverb are routed through the FX. I filled up 16 steps worth of triggers, and on the amp section had the depth turned all the way up at first. Then on the filter page, I turned up the resonance and envelope and played around with the frequency.
I had the delay time all the way at the fastest setting at first and at times would adjust it down and back up. And I tried sending it into the reverb and adjusting the time and pre-delay on that, but not as much of an effect there.
Pretty quickly I cut out some of the triggers on the pattern, added a lot of swing and dropped the steps down to nine to get a little better groove.
All in all, this is pretty weird territory for me! This first one is just meandering and playing around. I’ll see if I can come up with something a little more solid. I’ve got a little bit of free time today.
Had some fun with this yesterday, wish I had recorded everything! (will do this week-end)
The fun part, to me, is to play with the routing and hash the FX.
It’s cool that you can send the delay both under the bus and in the Reverb, so that you ca’ still have a pad-like activity behind your beat-like stuff ^^
Karplus-Strong has been a thing I’ve always loved.
Don’t sleep on the modulations though: you can use audio-rate LFO on the filter frequency, or routing, or pan, or amp: try them all! And be sure to experiment both with depth, speed and the start position, they all have a huge influence on the sound. When you find a sweet spot, though, it’s really satisfactory
One more with HPF, negative envelope, and LFOs on delay feedback gain and time.
My brain and ears are officially retiring for the night. I’m gonna go play some more Elden Ring and pass out. Looking forward to what you all come up with!
Transport was not running but BPM was set at 30 (for delay times).
All variations come from playing around with delay time and feedback mostly, but also LFO targets and other parameters.
The screeching, creaking door sound seems to come in when the delay time is dotted sixteenth. The loud noise bursts towards the end (at about 2’30") are from the LFO targeting FX routing.
