I didn’t wind up going for TAL Sampler, at least not yet. I still might!
I did pick up Goodhertz Lossy though, which was an accidental discovery when checking out their Vulf Compressor plugin. Which was designed as an emulation and expansion of the “LoFi Vinyl” setting on the Roland SP303 sampler, which is highly prized among some hiphop and dance music producers and which I’ve been hearing a lot about lately, thanks to investigating lo-fi samplers. It turns out, not doing the sort of drum stuff where that particular flavor of compression works best, the compressor itself didn’t grab me.
Lossy imitates MP3 compression artifacts — the filtering, loss of detail, smearing of transients and, well, blorpy smudge that happens with low-bitrate MP3s. It has a few other models of digital artifacts and glitches as well, including packet loss and packet repeats that can happen with UDP data streams. (UDP packets are smaller and have less bandwidth overhead than TCP, but are not guaranteed to arrive in order or even at all — which is acceptable for some kinds of real-time streaming where a little lost data is better than long dropouts and pauses, an ever-increasing time delay and eventual traffic jams.) It combines these with a filter and reverb, in a way that delightfully smears sounds. It works nicely in feedback loops and to take the edge off of sounds in a mix.
This is the time of year when Superbooth would normally be happening — a synthesis convention (modular and otherwise) in Berlin, a big expo and new product announcements and performances and drinking. With the pandemic, instead there’s been “Superbooth Home Edition” as well as Hainbach’s “Special Reserve Livestream.” Far more video than I’ve had time or inclination to watch, but a bunch of product announcements and performances and interviews nonetheless.
To me the most interesting announcement has been the Expert Sleepers Super Disting EX Plus Alpha, aka “Disting EX.” This is, sort of, a module I had been wishing for; I even referred to this dream module as “Super Disting” last September.
Disting (*) has been a series of small digital Eurorack modules capable of a wide variety of useful functions — envelope generator, comparator, VCA, oscillator, delay, sample player, exponential-to-linear converter, etc. — one at a time. The mk1-mk2 versions had 16 different algorithms, with binary code on LEDs telling you what mode it was in; the mk3 had more banks of algos added. The mk4 had a much improved 8×6 LED display which could show a couple of characters of text, but with 105 algos it still required patience and/or a cheat sheet to use. I had one for a while — it was my introduction to wavetables in Eurorack and prompted me to go for the E352 — and I found it excellent overall but a bit tedious. I thought a module in about 8-10HP, with a larger OLED display, would make navigating it and editing parameters much more workable, as well as give it the ability to act as an oscilloscope.
Well, this one has a small OLED display of the kind I tend to think of as a “window” for some reason — wide but short in height. It doesn’t do categorized menus, but reading the names of algorithms at a glance instead of waiting for them to scroll by or looking them up on a cheat sheet looks like quite an improvement (and a preset and favorites system can help reduce the search further).
The big deal though is that it is the equivalent of two Disting mk4s running side-by-side independently (with the display optionally “zooming” to show more detail of the one currently being edited) but with more memory and a higher sample rate; it can also run more involved “single mode” algorithms that use more inputs and outputs and processing power. Right now these include polyphonic multisample playback, “drum sampler” style playback, a tape delay based on the old Augustus Loop software, and a matrix mixer. And it can be controlled via knobs and CV but also MIDI and i2c — making that matrix mixer a VCA matrix, which is a whole other level of hot stuff.
(*) I figure it’s either named after the ancient yearly market in Uppsala, Sweden, the Dísablót Thing — or “what is dis ting?” Perhaps both.
To make some room for dis ting, I have swapped out my trusty Doepfer A-138m matrix mixer for an AI008 4×3 matrix mixer, which is half the width. Yes, I did just say Disting EX has a matrix mixer mode — but an analog one dedicated to the task, with no DAC latency, can be good for feedback purposes and letting the Disting do other things. I’ve also gone ahead and sold off my LS1 Lightstrip (which was redundant since getting the 16n Faderbank) and Flexshaper (which was a cool concept but I never really put it to much use). That leaves 12HP open, though I have no particular plans for that space right now.
Teletype got a firmware update recently, with a few cool new features. My favorite is the NR op — a rhythm pattern generator based on bitwise multiplication of a set of patterns, as found on the Noise Engineering Numeric Repetitor. With NR you can imitate the Repetitor pretty much exactly, but you have the freedom to do many other things with it. If I made something more akin to techno and I didn’t already have Noise Engineering’s pattern generation line of stuff, I would be thrilled beyond comprehension at this gift; as it is, it’s pretty cool and will likely get as much use as Euclidean patterns do now. Slow, odd time signatures can still benefit from repeating patterns whether the listener notices them consciously or not. It almost feels like I got another new module with this update.
