Sumu Beta Patch Test

video upload by BoBSwanS

"A little test of some patches I'm working on in Sumu, featuring a tiny little bit of reverb."

Madrona Labs SUMU BETA (exploration and preview)

video upload by DATABROTH

"please note that this is still in beta, you can read about sumu here: https://madronalabs.com/topics/8469-s...

This plugin is not ready for release so many things are subject to change,
I have been lucky enough to be granted permission to demonstrate this plugin in its current state"

Vutu Quickstart: Sound analysis for Sumu

video upload by Madrona Labs

"Vutu is a program for MacOS that turns sound files into collections of bandwidth-enhanced partials. Converting a given sound sometimes requires experimenting with the analysis settings. This video shows how to do that."

You can find additional posts featuring Sumu here.

Madrona Labs Sumu Preview & Aaltoverb Public Beta

You might remember the development of Sumu announced back in 2018. The preview is now available.

via Madrona Labs:

"In the same way that Kaivo brought two different and compatible kinds of synthesis together, combining granular synthesis with physical modeling, Sumu combines advanced additive synthesis with FM. Since it's been in the works for a long time, and is now nearing completion, I broke with my normal way of doing things and put out a detailed preview on the web site."

Sumu is an additive instrument that I've had in the works for a long time. Now that it's nearing completion and heading towards a public beta soon I'm going to break with the way I normally do things and put some detailed info out ahead of its release.

Sumu is another semi-modular instrument. It shares the general appearance of its patcher-in-the-center design with Aalto, Kaivo and Virta. As you can see, it's on the more complex end of the spectrum like Kaivo. Everything is visible at once and there are no tabs or menu pages to navigate, which suits the way I like to program a synthesizer tweaking a little something here, a little something there.

In the same way that Kaivo brought two different and compatible kinds of synthesis together, combining granular synthesis with physical modeling, Sumu combines advanced additive synthesis with FM synthesis.

What's most different about Sumu compared to my other synths is that the signals in the patcher are not just one channel of data, but 64—one for each partial in a sound! By keeping all these channels of data independent and still using the same patching interface, Sumu offers a very usable entry point into additive synthesis, and a range of musical possibilities that have only been approachable with high-end or academic tools or just coding everything yourself... until now.

Each of Sumu's oscillators is the simplest possible kind of FM:a single carrier+modulator pair. And the modulator can produce a variable amount of noise, which like the modulation ratio and depth can be controlled individually per oscillator. In a single voice there are 64 such pairs. Obviously a lot of sounds are possible with this setup—in fact, with the right parameters varying appropriately we can reproduce any musical sound very faithfully with this kind of oscillator bank..."

See Madrona Labs for additional details.

Aaltoverb public beta
Sumu's design combines a lot of animated displays, as well as a new popup menu system that I had wanted to add for a long time. The graphics / UI framework that I was previously using was a big help in getting Aalto and friends written but didn't have the speed to support the new designs, so I dove in and wrote one from scratch. This new UI kit runs entirely on the GPU using OpenGL and Apple's Metal framework. It's exciting to see it bringing the new designs to life. You can see a movie of some of the new menus here [instagram.com], that I now have running in Aaltoverb.

Another big improvement to the plugins going forward is that they will all run natively on Apple Silicon. I have one of the M1 Macbook Airs and it's a great machine for music, with impressive power for DSP, and no fan! I feel like we skipped forward a few years into the future with these machines.

This all brings us to the Aaltoverb beta. I've got these big enhancements—new graphics and Apple Silicon compatibility—to a beta state, but there's more work on Sumu to do before they could be tested there. So I'm rolling them out in a new version of Aaltoverb for Mac and Windows, released as a public beta. This way adventurous users can try the new features while I'm still finishing up Sumu.

Version 2 of Aaltoverb will be a free update."

Madrona Labs Introduces Aaltoverb

via Madrona Labs

"Hi there, it’s been some while. I'm excited to be writing you again, with the big news that there's a new beastie in the Madrona Labs family. Meet Aaltoverb, our very first effect.

A number of times over the years, people have asked if Aalto’s reverb could be made into its own plugin. The thing is, our focus here at Madrona Labs is on instruments, not effects. And so it didn't really seem to make sense to add a reverb to our lineup. But more time passed, and I started to think, what features would a performance reverb have? This question led to Aaltoverb, a reverberator with a focus on dramatic sound sculpting and completely smooth tweakability.

Aaltoverb’s coolest trick is this: you can smoothly change the size of the virtual space that the sound is reverberating in. This results in in pitch shifting that is reminiscent of what tape delays do when the speed changes. But instead of a single speed, the shift applies to the whole acoustic space, vibrating “air” and all. So a giant room can turn smoothly into a small and natural sounding chamber, and then into a tiny and very unnatural resonator. With longer decay times, weird spring-like beasties can be found along the way.

The controls are minimal, and are meant to interact in musical and inspiring ways. You can read all about Aaltoverb on the website, and in the manual. It's short but tells about some tricks you might not figure out otherwise. And: cartoons!

Aaltoverb 1.0.0 is available now as a 64-bit VST3 for Windows, and as 64-bit VST and Audio Units for Mac OS X. A single license covers both Mac and Windows and is $35.

Get a bundle deal!
Another thing people have asked about over the years is bundle deals. You know, where you buy more than one plugin at a time and as a result you get a discount. This was hard to imagine doing until our web maestro Philip did a bunch of work to modernize the site, including adding a shopping cart feature. But now that's done—and so are bundles.

They work very simply and so we're calling it the Simple Bundle feature. Buy more than one plugin in a single transaction, and save 15% off the entire purchase. That's it. Even if one of the plugins is, say, $35.

You’ll notice that Stripe, not PayPal, is now the default method of payment. We didn't want to leave people out in the cold just because PayPal didn't work in their regions, and since you need a credit card to get PayPal in the first place, hopefully this is more universal. We're always trying to improve the purchase experience, so please let us know how Stripe works for you. If you need or prefer to pay by PayPal for some reason, please get in touch.

Get the T-shirt!
I really love excuses to make a new T-shirt, and Aaltoverb's release seemed like a great one. I thought this one should be a collaboration and happily, Leafcutter John was into the idea. You might know the music he has put out on labels like Planet Mu and Border Community. This year he's gone and made a machine for making artworks, a homemade pen plotter, and the drawings he's making with it have really been pinging my visual cortex in a pleasant way. And so we made a shirt:

The design reminds me of sound decaying, and also of fabric being folded, and the analog robot quality is just (chef's kiss). I am wearing one nearly all the time, and you can too.

What about Sumu?
A long story that must be told short here, because it's nearly the cocktail hour. Very short version: I'm excited about Sumu, and now that Aaltoverb is out I can get back to finishing it.

Slightly longer version: I have some new design ideas for Sumu that required a lot of infrastructure work to pull off. Some to do with graphics and animation, and more on the DSP side of things. Well I dove into that infrastructure work and when I looked up it was a year later, or something. So both as a first use of the new framework and a way to, you know, ship a product, I decided to focus on the Aaltoverb release first. It's a cool enough reverb on its own, but to me it represents a lot more that's been done under the hood. As fall rolls around and I dive back into Sumu and Soundplane work I'm going to share some more about what's going on in there. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the sounds.

–Randy
Madrona Labs"

New Sumu Synth Coming from Madrona Labs

via the Madrona Labs newsletter:

"Sumu coming.

With the plugin updates completed, I'm now working full-time on the next software instrument, Sumu. It's going to be the last plugin in the patcher-in-the-middle format that Madrona Labs introduced with Aalto way back in 2010. Granular synthesis, as implemented in Kaivo, lets you decompose a sound into vertical segments (grains) each capturing an instant of the whole sound. A sines plus noise decomposition, used in Sumu, is a complementary tool that does very much the opposite, tracking individual sine wave partials of a sound horizontally through time in what's called spectral analysis.

Working with spectral data in a patchable environment has long been limited to the users of more general-purpose tools like Kyma and Max/MSP. With Sumu I'm designing a fixed set of modules that work in harmony together to make spectral sculpting a breeze."

Also:

"Summer Sale!

Greetings from the Pacific Northwest USA where it's summertime, and where the birds are singing a pretty song. Oh wait, that's Mixmaster Morris on in the background. Yes, ambient music of a wide variety of vintages and moods has been keeping things cool for me lately in the Labs and I'd be very pleased to help bring more into existence. Maybe you'd like to make some, using excellent instrument plugins, purchased at a discount? You've come to the right place.

A summer sale is currently in effect, so from now through the end of this month (August, in case you're not keeping track) Aalto, Kaivo and Virta are all 30% off their usual prices. Use the code PARTICLES on the product pages to get your discount. Until August 31.

Software updates.

Updates to all three instruments were sent out last week, and these fix a few long-standing issues that took some serious quality time here to resolve. MIDI and MPE compatibility, alternate scale handling, and a grip of minor UI issues all went under the knife and I hope that the resulting releases will be the most usable and compatible yet. As always, your feedback is welcomed via the forums or directly to support at madronalabs.com.

Because the plugins share so much code under the hood, I decided that a unified version number system makes more sense and so Kaivo and Virta have taken a larger leap to match Aalto at v1.8.3.

Thanks to the very kind help of Kurt and Carla at Symbolic Sound, there is now an update to the Soundplane software that fixes a Kyma connectivity issue. In addition to improving matters for Kyma owners, the change in OSC connection setup will allow playing Aalto or the other instruments on a different computer via Bonjour / Zeroconf. If this idea excites you, please grab the new release from the Soundplane forum and feel free to get in touch with any questions.

In very related news, Kiyoung Lee and Ha-young Park are going to be performing a new piece for Soundplane and Kyma at KISS2018 in Santa Cruz.

Fashion, beep beep.

Did you know there are still Aalto T-shirts? It's a good look for Fall, in my biased opinion."