Hey all,
A general question, why does the Digitone have a bass width filter and also LPF/HPF?
For example, what are the creative possibilities of two filters? Use one static and other with an LFO?
What are the advantages of two filters?
Edit: Base width not bass 🤦🏻
Cheers!
easiest example of two filters being extremely useful is when you have a pad sound that uses low pass filter, and sounds great like that on its own, but in arrangement of several instruments and patches, perhaps drums or bass, low end on that pad doesnt leave much room for anything else.
and thus you move the base to the right, to remove low end from the pad, to free up sonic space.
That’s an excellent explanation, thank you so much.
It’s like having an additional lowpass and highpass filter (without resonance), you can filter out some lows, or some highs or a little of both to make a sound sit more in the mids.
Very useful thing to have.
90% of the time I’m just using b/w to control the top and bottom of a sound (more like an eq than a filter), but I also use it creatively in conjunction with the delay/reverb input filters to get different timbre’s of echo/verb. I almost always have some amount of Filter1 doing soundscaping for my plucks, chord stabs, etc, and then set the b/w up as a wide-ish bandpass with the base as an lfo destination. When the lfo is low, I barely get any delay/reverb, but as the lfo moves higher, I get increasingly brighter echo/verbs.
They are also different types of filters – the main filters are 12 dB or 24 dB rolloff, whereas the base/width filters are 6 dB. Cuts away stuff more gently.
Remember its Base, not Bass. The Base refers to the frequency of the filter, the Width is how wide the amount of frequencies let past.
The best thing about Base/Width is that it can function as a Low-Pass, High-Pass or Band-Pass.
Turn Base fully left, wiggle width for a LP.
Turn Width fully right, wiggle Base, you have a HP.
Turn Width almost all the way left, wiggle Base, now its a BP, with the width of the band controlled by the width.
Its amazing because it can morph between all 3 types with only 2 controls!
Yeah, 6 db is very nice for eq work.
Base is the high pass filter cutoff frequency, width is the low pass filter frequency and since they are in series they form a variable bandpass. You can easily recreate this in your daw with an lpf and an hpf inserted after each other or load an eq and select a 6db low pass as well as a 6db high pass.
The manual has this nice graphic, although @Laser already explained it:
It’s only a pity we don’t have it on the L and R inputs…
I also use it as a general EQ / tone control.
I’ve never tried this, but since this filter is controllable with the LFOs I guess you could use the base portion together with the resonant low pass filter to obtain a swept resonant band pass filter effect.
…once u cross the point of producing on a broader amount, targeting more official appearance u stumble over the question, what’s going on for real in ur low end…
shaping ur lowest octave in overall frequency spectrum is THE challenge when it comes to comparable sonic results…
here the average bedroom production fails or suceeds, no matter what ur style might be…
low end is all over the place…everywhere…not only in ur dedicated bass sounds…
if ur not aware how to tame it to nail it, u always end up too muddy and only half as tight and powerfully pronounced as u might like to be…
in a daw that’s more easy to detect, in hardware not so much…so finding a second filter there that just let’s u have control over ur low ends or also top ends without the more obvious/classic filter colouring/shaping is an essential tool to give room to breathe to ur single elements so that ur sum can end up in overall better shape…
no matter how far we come with modern tech…some oldscchool basic rules of audio engineering/sounddesign/mixing skills always apply…gainstaging, compression and eq’ing are everlasting essentials…and first big lesson in low end is always, it’s all over the place and u better get a grip on it…
The base-width filter is used less in patch sculpting for me at the tracking phase than in mixing each track into the whole, so each is more distinct in frequency range.
