Did you get anywhere with this aspect? I can’t quite put it into word, but it feels really closed and tight. Maybe it’s the stereo spread? Maybe it’s just the mix.
I’ve not had a lot of time lately to get to grips with the Dellie, plus my main monitors aren’t in use at the moment either - I’m not used to working on headphones to be honest.
I love the workflow and find it interesting how it makes me write different music than another pieces of hardware. I’m certainly not regretting it! It’s been a fun and creative process. I just want to open it up a bit.
Well, to a certain extent. First, don’t underestimate the master eq. It does help to just bring things out a bit. Second, it’s easy to just throw stuff at the Deluge because of its generous polyphony. Don’t. Be mindful with your number of tracks going on. Those VA synths need the headroom to breathe. Third, I use the delay just to widen a track’s presence if I feel it needs it. So I approach it subtle, but for the purpose of letting that track be larger. You can’t use that trick on all tracks or you’ll just get mud, tho. In general, the fx smear the headroom more than contribute so use them sparingly and only if you really must.
Hah. Haven’t really given the Deluge as a midi sequencer only a proper chance, but am doing so now. It’s sequencing both timbres on my Prophet 12.
However, since the Deluge can assign multiple tracks to the same midi channel, it means I can get a lot out of the lonely Prophet by simply swapping tracks around between the two timbres on the Prophet. Furthermore, a track on the Deluge can be assigned to CC only and run independently of the others, kind of like polyrythm for CC, and that track can in itself run on and off in the Arranger, and suddenly I got an amazingly crazy flexible midi sequencer for complete tracks with just two timbres.
I’m like, maybe just a drummer to this and I’m done. And sure, yeah, I know, the Deluge is a sampler and synth, it stands very well on its own, but for that specific character, that MFB kick punch or Elektron cut-thru clicks, there’s nothing like a good old fashioned analoge drummer.
I wonder how the Rytm would pair with the Prophet 12, all of them running through the SSL SiX.
Oh my, this is cool. I didn’t realize this. I’m sequencing a Roland Boutique via a Deluge MIDI track on MIDI channel 1. If I create another MIDI track on channel 1, it shows up as 1A, 1B, 1C, and so on, on the Deluge. They can all run at once too, be different lengths, be populated with conditionals, be notes and/or CC messages. So fun to explore!
Yeah, pretty awesome, right? Prophet’s good at polyphony so I got tracks triggering it simultaneously, some of them eight bar chord sequences, others just five step random note conditionals, running together, and then cc tracks doing their own thing as a wrap around it all. This is seriously mind blowing stuff
Anyone know if it’s possible to load a synth preset into a kit lane, and if so, how? I don’t know if I just dreamt this was possible but I can’t seem to make it happen.
You can. I think you press the audition button of the kit lane, and then the Synth track button as you keep audition still pressed. Or something along those lines.
Audition + SYNTH = make a new blank synth on the kit lane. There doesn’t seem to be a way to actually load an exiting synth preset into a lane. Shame as it would be amazing for kit building.
Here’s hoping. Architecture wise it should definitely be possible (the Songs, Kits and Presets are very understandable XML files), just needs the UI side figuring out.
It’s frustrating because I’m in the middle of making a load of drum synth (no samples) presets and was hoping I could design all the individual drums as Synths, then just load them into a kit. At the moment, all I can do is save them as a Synth then load them into individual tracks. It’s not the end of the world but would be a million times better if you could kit a bunch together.
I could probably write a Python tool to do it offline but you couldn’t audition stuff.
That would be cool to be able to do, when I was using the synth engine to make drum kits I just did it all within 1 kit, which is a bit of a pain. I also think it should allow to copy rows within kits but it does not do that either, for example if making a tom sound and wanting to have 3 tunings for it you can’t just copy the first, you have to do the whole thing again from scratch.
Hopefully the next major update will address all these things as well as consolidate some of the shortcuts and functions to be consistent across all modes.
My main struggle with the Dellie is its actual output. It just doesn’t glue stuff together and the mix gets crowded awfully fast, and the onboard tools to fix it are about average.
But it does so many things so well, I feel it’s becoming as central to me for song writing as the Prophet 12 has become for sound design.
I certainly know what you mean. Recently I’ve found that leaving plenty of headroom on individual tracks helps to not mush everything togther at the outputs but it does lack an actual compressor and a better master EQ.
Yep. I’m don’t do full mixes in the Deluge anymore. But each track on its own responds quite well to whatever you do with it, so I tend to record each one into the Blackbox and then go from there.
Hey, yep, I got a review unit on its way but it hasn’t arrived yet. However, your question is interesting and it’s an angle I’m already preparing for the review, because the Blackbox is quite capable of recording streaming stereo tracks within one project, and play them back, up to sixteen at a time, without choking. Given that it’s got quite the headroom to fit a mix in, you can certainly use the Blackbox as a unit to record and mix final tracks. The trick lies in how you approach its fx. The filter behaves more like a multiple-band eq than an actual filter, the onboard reverb and delay are excellent if you view them as ways to fill out the mix and create space, and the onboard compressor, while it’s only on or off, has a pretty good default setting that kicks in when you push the output hard enough.
The Blackbox is very capable as a straight forward unit for mixing tracks, if you approach it the right way. So one thing I’ll be doing is seeing how big of a difference it makes for a track that’s taken about as far as possible within the Blackbox, and then multi-track it into the Bluebox. I’ve prepared a track for the purpose, doing an SSL SiX version of it using the Blackbox multiple outs, and then we’ll see what the Bluebox can bring to the table. Here’s the mix, for reference -
