One Of Those Funny Little Things...

I’d sing Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” now if I wasn’t busy sobbing in my morning caffeine-laced beverage. One of the features of Kombinat (and Dr. Device which birthed it) is the fact that the filter self-oscillates, like a “real” analog four-pole lowpass. Now, I’ll grant that this isn’t the most useful thing in the world, and was really just a way to show off a bit, because it is hard to do in software.

I had a feeling that this would cause a bit of consternation because so few software filters resonate on their own, so we inserted a special mention of this fact in the Kombinat manual:

…this filter can self-oscillate at high resonance, resulting in a tone, with the pitch determined by the setting of the frequency knob. This is not common in software-based filters, and may surprise you the first time you hear it.

I thought this perhaps unnecessary and overcautious, but as it turns out, I was right. (And let me tell you, I’m never shocked by that occurance, nosiree!!!) I got an email last night from someone that bought Kombinat that thought the filter was broken because it was emitting a tone when the resonance was all the way up.

And yes, that thump you heard was the sound of my forehead banging on the corner of my desk.

This, in and of itself, is not that big a deal, but it brings to light a greater question: how much does the software we use inform our creative methods? I know that I’ve entirely got out of the habit of key gating and sidechain compressing as a result of using Cubendo for several years, and these were both effects I commonly used when in a “real” studio. I’m sure if I thought about it, I could come up with other examples. Is there something you’re drastically missing as a result of the Big Switch from 2” tape to DAWs?

(And as an aside, if one of my dear readers speaks native German and fully comprehends why a filter that self-oscillates isn’t a bad thing, could you drop me a line; there is a serious language barrier with this particular customer, and I’m having a hard time explaining to him why it isn’t actually broken.)

EDIT: Never mind with the German stuff. My friend Ned hooked me up.