GND Sine pops/clicks solutions?

Elektron Gear Machinedrum
#1

Hey all,

Been giving my MD a bit of love lately so it doesn’t get nervous about the AR coming out soon.

One thing that has always nagged on me is the pop or click at the beginning of a GND sine machine (assuming it’s not just my machine that does this). I’m sure there is a thread on this amongst the forums but I didn’t find it immediately and I’m feeling too lazy go digging too deep.

Tried a volume lfo which seems to make it worse/different by adding a buzzy artifact. Usually I have enough other things going on that it gets buried, but when it’s soloed it can sound like an overdriven input or popping speaker. I guess what I’m getting at is I’d like to have a slightly rounder attack.

Any solutions out there?

BTW…Long live the Machinedrum. Amazingly good piece of machinery!

Cheers

#2

If trig LFO to vol doesn’t do it, maybe send it through a closed filter and use the trig LFO to open it up. With no harmonic content you can approach it with a high or low pass. Either way it should be silent till you sweep past the pitch of the sine wave.

#3

Nice. I’ll have to mess a bit more with that but lfo-ing the filter definitely sounds less clicky, gives it more of a “knock” which I like.

Thanks for the perspective StinkyBeat!

#4

Two solutions I commonly use:

  1. Use two tracks, instead of one.

  2. Assign LFO to modulate Decay parameter. Rather than modulating the Volume directly, modulate the Decay envelope so that it cuts off before the next trig.

#5

You’d think that on a VA machine, there’d be a wave-cycle reset option (the usual cause of this problem).

It’s something I was surprised to discover isn’t implemented on some of Elektron’s machines.

Even A4 supports it, and that’s analogue!

#6

I didn’t quite get it, till I read justinV’s post above. I knew with the punch of a low freq sine machine, it was retriggering the wave cycle. But, still get pops sometimes. Since the tracks are monophonic, it’s the end of the previous note still sounding that gets hard cut to zero. So, on a single track, end a note before triggering the next.

#7

Ah yes, that problem. On other synths, I often switch to poly mode, even if it’s a mono bass-line to get around it.

#8

Yeah, I’ve messing around with various solutions to find which one minimizes the problem with the least amount of steps.

Adjusting the decay on each step is one way, keeping the waves from slamming into each other. StinkyBeat’s Filter LFO is a good one (I like this because it doesn’t rely on fixed sequencing). Duplicating the track and tightening the decay on the original track (to maintain some punch) and putting a slow-ish vol LFO on the other track kind of works but is getting cumbersome and minimizes how much you can mess with a sequence once its done.

I wonder why the VOL LFO sweep by itself doesn’t take care of it.
Sounds “step-y”