Filter sweep - steps, locking up

Sorry - this will be vague, as I have seen the behaviour a few times, but never fully grasped what is causing it.

I think on FAT and ACD - when playing with filter and designing a patch while running a sequence, the filter knob still changes the displayed frequency, but the animation of the filter curve and the actual filter sound stop responding when going fully open to closed, around 75% maybe. You can turn right and open/close in that narrow band, but the full movement is gone until you load a new patch or engine.

I also noticed that the filter sweep when using a physical control (as opposed to LFO/modulation) at the lower end jumps in steps, not just on the displayed frequency but in the filter behaviour, which when you’re messing with resonance is quite unpleasant…

The OB filter in VA sounds almost like a phaser – I’m not familiar with how they should sound, but it’s interesting.

(I have been trying to master levels/mixing/output gain – it’s almost like it needs EQ per engine to allow them to mix with full dynamic range, panning can achieve a bit but it’s making me want to plug Synth in to somewhere I can reach the channel gain easily. I love it as a playing surface (apart from the pitch bend) but feel like I’m not getting the best out of the Synths, so to speak).

Good day @Bear, hope you’re doing well. I’ll take a moment later to see if I can replicate the behaviour you’re describing. A couple questions if you don’t mind

Did you have any other Engines running when experiencing this behaviour? Did you happen to see any CPU messages in the top left of the screen?

I think the OB filter is one of my favorite aspects of the VAP, especially the High Pass. Do you recall the filter type you were using when experiencing this behaviour?

I didn’t see any CPU messages – I may have had two instances of the same engine running, but it was after a period of time playing with sequencers and mixer - as if the 3x3 matrix first encoder was being asked to address different types of parameter and had forgotten what it was controlling.

Pretty sure it’s happened when I’ve had ACD on engine 2, FAT on engine 1, and PHZ or VAP on 3, but until I double check I could be mixing up ACD and FAT for which one ‘stuck’. It could be linked to using shift-hold as well – my first though was if it was a ‘relative’ adjustment getting confused when a patch was being sustained.

I was trying to figure out how to describe the 3-oscillator ‘relationship’ and structure of FAT for a review since you don’t see three VCOs to play with (unless I’m missing something!), but I’m fairly sure it’s ACD that displayed the behaviour.

It may be on occasions when I’ve visited the effects as well. I’ll do some more playing and see if I can replicate the behaviour, I just know it’s happened two or three times, when the first time I’d gone ‘weird bug’ and forgot about it. It stays that way even with all sounds stopped though, once it does it, it just seems to limit what values it’s passing to the engine, but the value reported in Hz continues to change.

The filter was lowpass OB24 with a lot of resonance (essentially trying to push it) – I can check the machine since it’s in the scene I’ve created to learn about making my own patches on it.

You’re not alone, same on my synth

I wonder if it’s related to a timbre Macro. The reason I’m still thinking there’s a bug is that it’s happened whem I’m programming something myself with no macros set, but I see that if you have a Timbre macro all the way up that limits the frequency range that can be set with the encoder, the frequency number changes with the encoder but not the graphic. Change the macro THEN touch the filter and the graphic jumps, but whatever the macro setting and graphic status, the frequency range displayed doen’t reflect the range allowed by the macro.

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I’ve had that behaviour happen to me as well, on multiple occasions.

Are you using macros to change the filter? It sounds like a macro altered the filter frequency which can prevent it from being fully open or closed.

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I wasn’t consciously using macros, but I have a suspicion that I may have inherited a macro setting from a scene when working on init patches and it didn’t affect it until maybe I accidentally knocked C1 instead of cutoff, waking up a macro position.