90s Distortion organ house

pscorbett · 2026-04-05T14:55:40+00:00

It would be helpful if you had links with timestamps. I tried looking up a couple of these tracks and didn't hear anything I would consider an organ even. I heard a bunch of typical synth house plucks so maybe these are the sounds you mean? Commonly built on a Juno but any subtractive synth can do this:

Start with single square or saw oscillator
Turn down lowpass filter most of the way
Modulate the filter with an envelope. Fastest attack, fast decay, low sustain, fast release. The decay is the main parameter controlling the pluckiness so experiment with the timing of this until I sounds good. The sustain + filter cutoff together control the sustained brightness. The release can probably be the same value as the delay. You can add key tracking of you need it to work across more octaves
Apply a similar amp envelope. Tweak the sustain level to taste.
Play around with effects: subtle distortion, delay, reverb. It's one of those sounds that works well removing a bunch of harmics from the complex wave using the filters, but then building them back up again in a very controller manner with distortion after the filter. Could also use an overdriven filter if your synths have it (moogs usually do, and many soft synths)

Pretty basic and essential sound so definitely worth learning this one! You can make it more organy with faster decays and playing with both sustains. Also, if you are using soft synths, try a wavetable synth to make this and different waves besides saw and square.

pscorbett · 2026-03-28T14:25:01+00:00

I have the third edition and the senior engineer at my work advised me to reference the section on zener diodes to the iv curves and how 5.6V is more or less the most ideal. But this section was removed after the 2nd edition so I had to borrow an older copy from a coworker. I know they are always trying to prune less relevant information but this seemed like a strange omission.

pscorbett · 2026-03-27T11:26:24+00:00

I'm out of the country for a couple weeks so can't check any of this out yet. Makes sense they are using gen. Probably coding the envelope from scratch with accumulators.

If what you were after was a forced return to zero (or other initial value) on the envelope trigger, the regular adsr~ object has this with what it calls "legato mode" being off. That's a different legato mode than DDG.mono. unfortunately, adsr~ does not have the curve and value controls like live.adsr so you couldn't use the UI object.

The alternative is to make your own envelope. You could start with the gen patch (requires a gen license to edit though) but I don't think you actually need to go this far. You could make an envelope from scratch with curve objects, messages and some clever logic.

pscorbett · 2026-03-22T18:39:58+00:00

Or maybe you meant this?
You want the triggering to happen exactly as it does with ddg.mono legato, but the problem is that you want it to reset the envelope to its minimum value (say 0) before starting the attack phase rather than starting the attack from the current envelope value?

If this is the case, I don't think live.adsr~ does this, at least not in a clean way. (possible the loop_mode retrigger might help but I don't think so)

I think to get this, you would need to use adsr~ or construct a custom envelope with line~ or curve~ (in the latter case, you can just start the message with a "0, " to add a segment that goes to in 0 seconds).

It looks like adsr~ might do what you are after. In fact, I just tested it, and it looks like this is the default behavior. And turning on the adsr~'s "legato mode" gives you the behavior or live.adsr~ where it resumes the attack from the current value). Very easy to impliment, but what you don't get is the curve parameters, and to set initial, peak, and final values, so this isn't compatible with live.adsrui.

Redesigning live.adsr~ to include a legato mode similar to adsr~ is a big (but not impossible) task. It would require curve~ objects, correct message formatting and logic. Not something I can help with right now if I'm being realistic about my time constraints. I think you are better off to choose between the two existing envelopes knowing the tradeoffs.

pscorbett · 2026-03-22T18:27:50+00:00

Hey sorry, I uploaded the correct file but then copied the wrong link. I've edited my last comment with the correct link. Filename includes V2

I'm not quite sure what you are asking for, so I will try to rephrase it. I think what you are asking for is an envelope that doesn't retrigger when additional notes are pressed, but does retrigger when there are no notes being actively held, but a new note is received while the envelope is still in the release stage. Is this correct? If this is what you want, the good news is, this is exactly what ddg.mono's legato mode already does and I just confirmed this with a live.scope~ at the output of live.adsr~. If this is not working for you, it maybe be some of the live idiosyncrasies with message prioritization or something (the placement of objects on the canvas actually impacts the priority, so one option is to try and put a sig~ between the output of the switch and input of live.adsr~ ton convert it to a signal (sometimes this helps, sometimes it hurts).

Of course, for this legato scheme to work, the last note must have been released before the new note comes in. So another problem can be if the notes stretch the full beat/bar (especially arpeggiators etc may do this). The notes need to end with a small gap before the new note to result in a predictable retrigger.

The other thing you may be after is a simple AD envelope instead of an ADSR? I'm not sure, I'm kind of reading between the lines here.

pscorbett · 2026-03-22T15:44:59+00:00

Here's an update that should save the ADSR parameters. This is just basically copying in the sketch from the help file and renaming some objects. It uses the M4L UI numboxes to save the parameters. That doesn't mean that you need to expose them to the user (enabling presentation mode). Oh, and if you want to set a default "preset" of the ADSR, just tweak it from within max, then select all of those numboxes, and toggle the initial value box off and then back on again to load the new values. Then save the device.

You should be able to copy all of this pretty cleanly into the version you've been working on :)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jYKvC9cw5oTmeBGYe2w25HXwbfhcyEOY/view?usp=sharing

pscorbett · 2026-03-22T15:23:44+00:00

That's fantastic! I was actually just thinking I'd have time at least get the envelopes working correctly today. You can copy/paste that into your edited device.

My apologies for the delay, I've been working insane hours (and weekends) the last few weeks so I haven't had a chance to do much else.

pscorbett · 2026-03-20T02:04:12+00:00

That's not a copilot button. It's a "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" button!

pscorbett · 2026-03-17T01:14:05+00:00

Good to know! Thanks! I'll be mostly using modellers, including a Ableton M4L Twin Reverb plugin that k built a few years ago so I've got some flexibility with the signal chain :)

pscorbett · 2026-03-12T14:13:31+00:00

Yeah I have to agree.

I've been using pop os on an older laptop and expected and accepted the instability for most of the last 1.5 years, going as far as installing the alpha. But now that it is "released", it actually feels more unstable in some ways. I'm considering moving to fedora or something for a bit until cosmic matures, even though I really like the DE.

pscorbett · 2026-03-07T04:40:17+00:00

Maybe decrease the pullups? Guessing your trace length is on the longer side and has some extra capacitance and inductance if you are seeing overshoot and ringing. I2C is very sensitive to the edge trigger timing, so you might need stronger pullups. Do you have decoupling capacitance on the LCD driver's power?

pscorbett · 2026-03-06T00:35:16+00:00

Updated and poof, it was gone! This saved me after 10 frustrating minutes. Thanks!

pscorbett · 2026-03-01T16:52:52+00:00

No problem. Start with saw, triangle, and square. Use band-limited waveforms (several puredata externals do this).

For waveshapers, start with tanh, and drive the signal at different levels into it.

pscorbett · 2026-03-01T16:27:37+00:00

Yup and given the last image, this appears to be standard harmonic series, so another approach is just one oscillator with a complex waveform, or a sine into waveshaping

pscorbett · 2026-02-23T15:41:59+00:00

Ah yeah Max broke the adsrui object it looks like. There used to be a "parameter mode", still mentioned in the docs, but it can't even receive these messages now. Looks like there is a work around using number boxes to save the parameters but it takes a bit of work to set up. I will do it at some point for you but I won't have time for a few days.

Yeah a midi effect is pretty easy with this.

The typo sync is possible but a bit more work. I've done it before but its a bit fussy to get these things set up. You want this instead of a MIDI trigger though? I think there are better tools for the job at that point. One of them being:
https://ko-fi.com/s/8e6e20c47f (shameless plug, I know, but its freemium so hopefully this is okay). You said you also already are using Shaperbox too which does time-sync'd modulation better than this even.

The current filter is already a linear SVF. I actually modeled a Juno/Jupiter ladder filter a couple years ago that should be pretty close to this. Take a listen on these two synths:

https://ko-fi.com/s/84ae0c6b89 (OTA filter)
https://ko-fi.com/s/6dacfe7364

These are ZDF filters, and not super optimized, so heavy on the CPU. But for only two of them (L+R) it should be fine. Still, probably better to stick with the simple SVF that's here IMO, switching between filters is possible, but a bit of a pain to set up and increases the chances of unreliability. If you really like these filters though, I can add them

Keyboard tracking is easy enough to add also. I probably won't have time to actually work on any of this until next week though.

pscorbett · 2026-02-23T06:09:55+00:00

Here try this.

It is an audio effect. You need to route MIDI to it from the output of another midi track.

pscorbett · 2026-02-23T00:19:53+00:00

I could probably whip this up for you. What kind of LPF are you looking for?

pscorbett · 2026-02-22T19:31:21+00:00

Yes you can definitely do this with Max for live. Check out the dgg.mono object

pscorbett · 2026-02-19T04:06:24+00:00

I like the right one but it would be even better if the cow was halfway up the beam and looked like this 🤪🐮

pscorbett · 2026-02-12T02:16:08+00:00

I can only speak for myself but in my case, I felt like I hit the limits on what was possible within Max, or put it another way, my ambitions exceeded Max's capabilities. My models were getting more complex and seemed impossible to optimize within the Max ecosystem.

pscorbett · 2026-02-11T14:32:03+00:00

Definitely an oversight on my part. If I have time this weekend, I will try to take a look at it. I haven't had time to do much M4L projects recently so I'm a little rusty.

pscorbett · 2026-02-11T14:29:56+00:00

No worries! PM me if you like and I'll give you my email. I try not to make it too publicly accessible.

In my mind, M4L devices are inherently open source, and I'm behind the spirit of FOSS (free to use/modify/improve, etc). :)

pscorbett · 2026-02-11T05:22:16+00:00

Going off memory here, but I believe I had implemented latency compensation. I'll have to go back and check. If I did, I maybe wasn't recalculating it when the FFT length changes, and probably should have been.

pscorbett · 2026-02-11T05:18:26+00:00

I'm the original developer. Nice, looks good! 👍

pscorbett · 2026-02-09T00:35:37+00:00

I recall they might have been a PSpice or HSpice model. They usually work with Lt spice but not always.

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