Bug: white noise turning on when switching between beats

[yerimbetov]

Hi!
This thing happens to my Tempest. In 2 projects out of 10 I have a loud and disturbing white noise turning on when the next beat starts playing OR is being selected without even pressing PLAY button. Also, it happens in a specific order and with specific beats. The noise is fairly loud and of unpredictable behaviour: it can play with super long decay or gets choked with some voice. Not that I tried EVERYTHING, but has anyone experienced this? 

[Yorgos Arabatzis]

A little bit info about your main OS,voice version etc. would help...

[yerimbetov]

A little bit info about your main OS,voice version etc. would help...

Oh yes!
Main OS: 1.5.0.2
Voice: 1.5

[Yorgos Arabatzis]

Have you calibrated OSCs with all cables unplugged?Are you using the compressor/Distortion?

[RobH]

Also check if you are using the LFO's assigned to the VCA possibly, which can be assigned to beat or note so when the beat begins it opens the VCA up on a sound you are using noise.

Also yes check your Distortion/Compressor settings like Yorgos suggests.

The fact this is happening when your not even playing the Tempest makes me think you are using LFO's set to VCA which will play regardless opening and closing the VCA's at all times in play mode or stopped.

[John the Savage]

Hi!
This thing happens to my Tempest. In 2 projects out of 10 I have a loud and disturbing white noise turning on when the next beat starts playing OR is being selected without even pressing PLAY button. Also, it happens in a specific order and with specific beats. The noise is fairly loud and of unpredictable behaviour: it can play with super long decay or gets choked with some voice. Not that I tried EVERYTHING, but has anyone experienced this? 

This sounds like a bug that I found and documented during intensive beta testing with Roger Linn last year.  It was an edge case, and as such, to the best of my knowledge anyway, it was never fixed.  It happens when there is a disparity between the envelope settings of sounds sharing the same pad in different beats.  If you determine this to be the problem, try moving the offending sound to a different pad.  At any rate, here's that conversation:

Hi Roger,
 
A quick aside here:
 
Attached is a dump of a slapdash beat file containing a couple sounds that I was using to test various modulation parameters. The sound on Pad 8 was used to test the Velocity/Pressure bug, and the sound on Pad 16 was used just to test the Digital Oscillator Amplitude bug...
 
Anyway, I noticed an anomaly with the sound on Pad 16 when switching beats: i.e. it's as though the envelopes suddenly let go, causing the digital oscillators to bounce up to full volume at the beat transition.  You'll notice that this doesn't happen with the analog sound on Pad 8.  Nor have I ever had it happen to a sound using the digital oscillators before now.
 
You can test this simply by playing the beat, setting your beat quantize to something short (like a 16th note for instance), and interupting the sound on Pad 16 by transitioning to an adjacent empty beat in the middle of the sound's decay... You should hear what I'm talking about.
 
Not sure what's going on there...
 
Cheers,
 
John

Ha— this one took me a couple hours to narrow down:

Do "Edit > Initialize Beat" on beats 1 and 2.
On Beat 1 / Sound A1, set OSC3 level = 0, VCA Env Att = 100.
In Beat Events screen, press Insert Step soft key to insert an event for sound pad A1 at location 1.1.1.
In 16 Beats / Pads screen, set BtQuant = Bar. With Beat 1 still selected, play Play then quickly press Beat pad 2.
Notice a noise plays at the transition to beat 2, though no event is there.

The problem is a tricky one:

In Beat 1, the A1 sound’s OSC3 has a level of 0 and an AD attack time of 100, but the same pad’s setting in Beat 2 has a level of 120. The attack time is long enough to sustain for more than one bar, so at the bar 2 transition its OSC3 LVL is switching from 0 to 120, allowing you to hear the remainder of the Beat1/Sound1’s long envelope.

The good news is that this will only occur in very rare conditions: the first beat’s sound has a long VCA AD envelope attack or decay but an OSC3 or 4 Level of 0, and the same sound in the second beat has a normal OSC3 or 4 level.

The fix would require zeroing the envelope level of any playing sounds at a beat transition, which would be bad because cymbals at the end of a beat wouldn’t sustain into a newly-selected beat. So I think it’s best to leave it as it is. Do you agree?

- Rog

Here's hoping you get it sorted.  Let me know if this was at all helpful...

Cheers!

[RobH]

Hi!
This thing happens to my Tempest. In 2 projects out of 10 I have a loud and disturbing white noise turning on when the next beat starts playing OR is being selected without even pressing PLAY button. Also, it happens in a specific order and with specific beats. The noise is fairly loud and of unpredictable behaviour: it can play with super long decay or gets choked with some voice. Not that I tried EVERYTHING, but has anyone experienced this? 

This sounds like a bug that I found and documented during intensive beta testing with Roger Linn last year.  It was an edge case, and as such, to the best of my knowledge anyway, it was never fixed.  It happens when there is a disparity between the envelope settings of sounds sharing the same pad in different beats.  If you determine this to be the problem, try moving the offending sound to a different pad.  At any rate, here's that conversation:

Hi Roger,
 
A quick aside here:
 
Attached is a dump of a slapdash beat file containing a couple sounds that I was using to test various modulation parameters. The sound on Pad 8 was used to test the Velocity/Pressure bug, and the sound on Pad 16 was used just to test the Digital Oscillator Amplitude bug...
 
Anyway, I noticed an anomaly with the sound on Pad 16 when switching beats: i.e. it's as though the envelopes suddenly let go, causing the digital oscillators to bounce up to full volume at the beat transition.  You'll notice that this doesn't happen with the analog sound on Pad 8.  Nor have I ever had it happen to a sound using the digital oscillators before now.
 
You can test this simply by playing the beat, setting your beat quantize to something short (like a 16th note for instance), and interupting the sound on Pad 16 by transitioning to an adjacent empty beat in the middle of the sound's decay... You should hear what I'm talking about.
 
Not sure what's going on there...
 
Cheers,
 
John

Ha— this one took me a couple hours to narrow down:

Do "Edit > Initialize Beat" on beats 1 and 2.
On Beat 1 / Sound A1, set OSC3 level = 0, VCA Env Att = 100.
In Beat Events screen, press Insert Step soft key to insert an event for sound pad A1 at location 1.1.1.
In 16 Beats / Pads screen, set BtQuant = Bar. With Beat 1 still selected, play Play then quickly press Beat pad 2.
Notice a noise plays at the transition to beat 2, though no event is there.

The problem is a tricky one:

In Beat 1, the A1 sound’s OSC3 has a level of 0 and an AD attack time of 100, but the same pad’s setting in Beat 2 has a level of 120. The attack time is long enough to sustain for more than one bar, so at the bar 2 transition its OSC3 LVL is switching from 0 to 120, allowing you to hear the remainder of the Beat1/Sound1’s long envelope.

The good news is that this will only occur in very rare conditions: the first beat’s sound has a long VCA AD envelope attack or decay but an OSC3 or 4 Level of 0, and the same sound in the second beat has a normal OSC3 or 4 level.

The fix would require zeroing the envelope level of any playing sounds at a beat transition, which would be bad because cymbals at the end of a beat wouldn’t sustain into a newly-selected beat. So I think it’s best to leave it as it is. Do you agree?

- Rog

Here's hoping you get it sorted.  Let me know if this was at all helpful...

Cheers!

Thanks John thats actually really interesting, i'll remember that incase anyone in the future encounters the same problems or indeed if i do!

[yerimbetov]

Have you calibrated OSCs with all cables unplugged?Are you using the compressor/Distortion?

Yes, this is pretty much the first thing I do whenever I encounter a problem

[yerimbetov]

This sounds like a bug that I found and documented during intensive beta testing with Roger Linn last year.  It was an edge case, and as such, to the best of my knowledge anyway, it was never fixed.  It happens when there is a disparity between the envelope settings of sounds sharing the same pad in different beats.  If you determine this to be the problem, try moving the offending sound to a different pad.  At any rate, here's that conversation:

Here's hoping you get it sorted.  Let me know if this was at all helpful...

Cheers!

Hi! Thank you very much for your reply. I turned off the inactive noise oscillators in the beats that were previous to ones with decaying noise. Those oscillators with noise assigned were actually doing the funky stuff, even though they were on zero level (!). I will save Roger Linn's reply for future issues as this is really helpful and not very obvious. Thanks a lot again!

[John the Savage]

This sounds like a bug that I found and documented during intensive beta testing with Roger Linn last year.  It was an edge case, and as such, to the best of my knowledge anyway, it was never fixed.  It happens when there is a disparity between the envelope settings of sounds sharing the same pad in different beats.  If you determine this to be the problem, try moving the offending sound to a different pad.  At any rate, here's that conversation:

Here's hoping you get it sorted.  Let me know if this was at all helpful...

Cheers!

Hi! Thank you very much for your reply. I turned off the inactive noise oscillators in the beats that were previous to ones with decaying noise. Those oscillators with noise assigned were actually doing the funky stuff, even though they were on zero level (!). I will save Roger Linn's reply for future issues as this is really helpful and not very obvious. Thanks a lot again!

Yep, it's an elusive bug to be sure, difficult to diagnose.  Glad I could help though.  I would have suggested simply turning the digital oscillators off, but thought it better to assume that your sounds were actually using them.  In the future, if you do have one or more sounds that are using the digital oscillators, and you encounter this bug, try moving the offending sounds to separate pads, so they no longer share the same pad at the beat transition, as I suggested above.

And a friendly word of advice to anyone making patches, especially if they find themselves encountering problems: I always make a habit of turning off and zeroing any and all unused parameters {oscillators, envelopes, LFO's, modulation slots, etc.} as a matter of course.  If I had a nickle for every time I've waded through someone else's mess, looking for a suspected "bug"—Ahem!

Not you, yerimbetov, just saying (wink).

Cheers!