Timo here! By the time you read this, firmware 1.5 should be out!
The dev diaries seem to have settled down to a pace of one per update cycle, largely because we’ve been so busy. But so be it, I’d expect you’re much happier reading using the new firmware than reading these blog posts!
The big highlight of firmware 1.5 is of course the effects. My personal favorite is the Stage Reverb, which is based on code by Signalsmith Audio, who provided us with the basic feedback structure and sets of delay times optimized for our limited sample RAM, with a roadmap for adding necessary details such as internal modulation and filtering. We did precisely that, adjusted the parameter sets and their ranges, and the end result is better than we dared to hope! Big thanks Geraint!
My other equally favorite effect is Vintage Chorus, which replicates digitally the sound of a very famous synthesizer chorus with I, II and I + II modes, for immediate gratification with a lush stereo image. This, and all the remaining effects, are the work of Antti Huovilainen, who made an amazing job in getting these effects to sound good without taxing the CPU too much. Jussi added visuals, and fine tuned parameter ranges and defaults for easy usability.
The two remaining effects are X-Delay, which allows for tempo synced cross-panning delays, and Chorus+, which takes the core of Vintage Chorus, forgets its vintage heritage, and makes almost everything user controllable. The X-Delay turned out to be a bit more work than we’d anticipated, since tempo syncing a delay naively causes it to pitch shift exactly like a tape whose speed is being controlled to match a varying tempo, and the slightest drift in an external clock would be easily audible. So basically we had to improve our external tempo estimation by a ton to make that work (thanks to Antti for that too!). As a nice side effect, that made the tempo display on the clock and perform pages much more stable too. Actual sync to MIDI clock for the arpeggiator or LFO’s is not affected, since that was pretty tight before, and interestingly locking something tightly to a clock is an almost completely different problem than estimating the rate of said clock to high precision.
The effects are on the main output only, and only one effect at a time. However, because I had two equally favorite effects, we ended up adding an option to use Vintage Chorus together with Stage Reverb, and while we were at it, also X-Delay. We might implement several effects slots in an upcoming update, but that will be quite some time in the future, if it ever happens, so this gives what is probably the most common option, chorus into reverb or delay, right now.
Given that we now had to implement the engine switching logic and UI for the effects anyway, the path was also open to adding new engines elsewhere. Indeed, we prototyped the engine switching with a new filter engine, “Mirror Twins”, which configures the analog VCF to a shape with two peaks and two notches, giving rise to a range of new filter shapes. This is what we used to call “Phaser engine” previously, but since it makes possible so much more, we decided to name it after the two pairs of peaks, and give the option to have one of the twins be evil! BTW: the new preset called “In an Evil Phase” would be “He’s going through an evil phase”, if we’d only have a bit longer preset names. Pun intended, sorry about that.
Which brings us to presets: since the effects change the range of possible sounds quite a lot, we went through all the internally created presets and added effects to all of them (except in a few limited cases where dry sound felt like the correct choice given the context). If we happened to mess with your favorite preset, you can get back to the old version simply by disabling effects with shift + FX. While we went through all of them, we also rearranged the factory presets, which had previously been ordered mostly by which firmware they appeared in, such that the first presets now give a more complete picture of what the Redshift can do. There’s also 14 new presets spread throughout. We didn’t add effects to presets made by Starsky Carr, Kebu and Gattobus, but you can of course easily spice them up to your liking!
Next update will feature Macros, which are actually ready for beta more or less now, since 1.5 has cleared out of its way on the beta channel, and Sequencer, which we’re working on hard right now. Actually, I have to get back to it, and see you in the next Dev Diary!