What’s next for Ess / Fors?

Yeah gonna try that for sure! I wanted to evaluate how it behaves with self-modulation and stuff first so that’s why it’s not there yet. Can get tricky. The mod matrix is very nice and pragmatic right now so I’d like to avoid any special case code if I can.

That’s kind of the general rationale here, add things slowly based on feedback and my own plans to make sure they really work conceptually etc.

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Hey @Ess Was it not poss to fix the undo history flooding with the combined controls (env dec/sus, filter freq/res) ?

I did! It’s in the change log. Maybe misleading that it’s under improvements but it’s technically not a bug. Just Ableton Live being awful at batching parameters.

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Hmm, still flooding here with Pivot Lite 1.1 (VST3, Intel, macOS 13.7.6)

Strange! I’ll have to take another look but it definitely fixed things on my end. Honestly more or less an issue in Live afaict

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That’s lovely to hear, I’m sure you’ll come up with something that’s easy to use and useful :slight_smile:

And yeah, self-modulation gets tricky fast and doesn’t necessarily have to be there imho. But that’s easy to say from the outside and without being a programmer :wink:

Just got Pivot and I’m genuinely floored, judging by 5 minutes this is the best Fors synth yet. Goes so well with Sala. Pigments ain’t crap.

I thought I saw someone mention the same thing, but it would be nice if you could grab and drag the parameter names to change things. Especially with the LFO shape/phase it gets fiddly.

Now just hoping stars align and this would be portable to Push somehow

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Thank you! Very glad to hear that :—)

I don’t want to change the way the number boxes work - I think it’s good how fast it is to type in a value. Having to double click also makes the intent more vague.

I think it would be better to improve the parameters that feels fiddly, so please do let me know what makes it feel fiddly and I’ll look into that.

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I have Dyad in my main Template. But in that case the push interface doesn’t load. I need to reload the Dyad instance for that to work again. Feels a bit like a bug and from what i’ve read so far probably Ableton itself.
In Sting 2 there’s a toggle for the push interface.
It would be great to see such a feature implemented in Dyad too, if that makes sense from a design perspective.

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Yeah I’ve been meaning to ask Iftah about that, seems like a better approach. The Push stuff is still so fussy.

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Love Pivot by the way! If I don’t know better I would say this could actually make me understand FM synthesis :joy:

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Tried it a bit now, bizarre! I swear I fixed this, maybe it’s a bit tempramental? Not hard to repro, will try and fix it for real™ … sorry about that!

I wonder if this is even fixable in Live with multiple parameter changes at once. It may just be a bad implementation on their end. Most DAWs batch parameter changes like these, but Live doesn’t do that kind of stuff at all. Will keep prodding in any case.

(e.g changing a preset or randomizing in any plugin will also register discrete steps in the undo history, which is crazy)

EDIT: same behavior in other plugins with X/Y controls… Hrm. I urge anyone that’s annoyed by this to contact Ableton’s support so that they escalate a fix for this actually. Could also be a JUCE<->Ableton thing FWIW.

But safe to say is that if FabFilter can’t fix this then I probably can’t either.

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(I’m aware I’m not offering easy fixes, especially with the ADSR it’s tricky, sorry for that):

At least the LFO SKEW/SHAPE – it’s tricky to change shapes without changing SKEW.

Also, this is not at all as clear, but the way the ADSR controls work:

  • I’m having a bit of trouble seeing the small squares light up – maybe the affected segments could be highlighted on mouseover?
  • I like the implementation where you modify decay and sustain by X/Y’ing the sustain part, but there’s the same SKEW/SHAPE dualism where it’s tricky to change one without changing the other
  • When Attack is 0, you kind of have to either aim at the small square or hover to the left of the entire actual ADSR shape, which feels kind of unnatural
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Yeah no that’s great, thanks!
The ADSR is already on my radar, just need to improve the hit detection there a bit I think.

The X/Y controls actually already have some “favoring” of direction in place when you start dragging but perhaps that could be stricter in some places. It does get worse with the LFO control because you often don’t want to change the Skew at all.

I could also consider adding snapping by holding down Alt or Cmd/Ctrl or something along those lines, much like how you draw straight or diagonal lines in a lot of graphics software.

Appreciate the feedback!

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All that sounds nice!

Agreed, I modify skew rarely, but maybe this’ll get me skewing more :smiley:

One more niggle – N=1 and all, but: With the LFO, the way clicking on ‘shape’ and getting the shape name in text, e.g. ‘sin’, and then having to input a number 1–5 is surprising. Like, one changes to the other, and you need to input the third thing. But of course, having access to a numeric shortcut is valuable, and you only need to learn the logic once.

This sounds like a great idea. Using ⌥ to constrain a selection is almost automatic for me.

No way :grimacing: Can’t believe I’ve never noticed this before.
Sure enough, dragging eq nodes around in Fabfilter ProQ floods the undo too.
Interestingly their own devices manage just fine (e.g. Auto Filter, EQ Eight…), so this should be totally fixable, surely. I’ll mither them about this anyway, cheers Ess!

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OT but quick shoutout for use of “mither”. Damn fine word. I wish more people used it.

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TIL ’mither’ :+1:

Conjures up a Tony Soprano original, ’miffled’

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Bought Pivot some time ago and had great time playing around with it. I’m optimising my setup for live performance and I noticed that Pivot adds 64 samples of latency in my Ableton Live. Is there any way to reduce the amout latency the Pivot adds? A bummer I’d say.