#86 Harmonic filter

[unfa]

The idea came to me when thinking about simulating drum resonance.

For kicks and snares I use a standard resonant HP filter for that - I cut off unwanted low-end and boost the drum body resonance, giving more thump to the drum sound.

However - I realized that the resonance is not just one band - it should be a lot of bands creating a harmonic series. But that's not easy to do with simple peak filters - you'd need to stack them, and calculate frequencies and gains for good simulation, and changing the frequency would require a ton of manual work. Doable to some extend with Zyn EQ, but definitely not much useful.

Why not make a special filter unit that creates a harmonic (or inharmonic if the user wants) bank of bell (peak) filters that tune automatically to harmonic frequencies of the fundamental filter frequency picked by user? This could be also a harmonic notch filter as well - creating comb-like efects but in a different and much more controlable fashion -because one could for example change the harmonic to inharmonic with automation.

Just an idea. What do you think?

[Mark McCurry]

You're essentially describing the subsynth filter bank with the harmonic overtone shifting which was imported from pad synth. Putting the whole of this functionality as a choice for every filter seems like overkill to me, though having a comb filter option might make some sense.

[unfa]

Well I mean a much simplified version without individual harmonics control.

Howevere being able to put such a filter bank onto a patch in Substnth, having an FM-modulated waceform underneath sounds like a lot of ways to sculpt the sound, especialy when using the filter's pitch tracking to produce musical sounds out of not so musial sounds - the difference is in Subsynth there's no easy way to create a saw-wave like sound - the sound sound is always white noise and such a filter bank could allow for some nice new sounds I think.

[unfa]

This got me thinking of a different idea, that could be both simplier to implement and give more creative freedom to arists:

Could it be possible to make SUBsynth not use internal stereo white noise, but the output of ADDsynth or PADsynth (or both) as it's source?

The main benefit is that one can make a rich texture with ADD or PAD synth, and then push this thorugh SUBsynth (as a filter) - and automate the parameters like harmonics shift, bandwidth etc. I think it would open up a whole new world of possibilities.

I just don't know how trouble some would this be to code? Doesn't seem like a lot has to be changed, but I don't know the inner workings of Zyn.

What do you think?

[Mark McCurry]

There's some interesting possibilities with the described feature, but I'd say it's unlikely to be explored given the current project resources.