Filter oddities with max resonance on Windows

Surprised nobody’s noticed this yet, makes me almost wonder if it’s my setup, but I’ve tried this in multiple DAWs with the same result.

Cranking up the filter resonance to 100% produces some immensely glitchy behavior. Namely, you get an everlasting sine wave that doesn’t respond to the filter envelope or the keyboard gate, instead simply playing indefinitely at whatever the filter cutoff is set to. Sometimes you don’t even need to press a note in order to start the sine wave playing.

Steps to reproduce are pretty simple - from init patch, go to effects > filter, crank resonance up to 100% and press any note. This occurs in most, possibly all, filter types.

If I understand correctly: if you set the filter resonance at max , a sine wave is introduced:
It’s normal, this is how good self resonance works. Example: the famous Mood Ladder filter is four 1 pole filters in series with feedback loop.
The result is: if your feedback amount is high, the feedback loop is infinite like a delay with max feedback.
If you want to have max resonance, you could mod it with an env and it will stop at the end of the env.

No, you don’t understand correctly.

Sine waves at max resonance are normal. You don’t need to tell me that. I’m not stupid. But a constant, droning sine wave that doesn’t change frequency with filter envelope, and doesn’t go away after you release a note is not normal.

This doesn’t seem to be an issue on the latest Windows build(1.0.3), at least not on my end.

Hi Nick, thanks for checking this out.

Just to make sure we’re both on the same page, I’ve attached a preset. For me, playing any note will result in the resonance sine lingering forever. If this doesn’t happen for you I’ll just figure it’s something to do with my setup and will try not to get too jealous of those having fun with Vital :slight_smile:

(you may have to copy-paste the link, not sure if links are automatically plain-texted for new accounts like mine)

You’re using filter in the “effects” section and that’s why this happens. Gates, amplitude envelopes etc have no effect there (unless you route them there) and for a good reason too. Think about reverb for instance: if your amplitude envelope has a short release time, it would shut down the reverb as well.

There are no oddities or anomalous behavior here, it’s just as you would expect from a filter in that section of the synth. If you tried doing this with the main filter section that exists before the effect section (go to voice and see bottom for your 2 filters), now you get your expected filter behavior.

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Well geez, I feel stupid now! I thought it was a little bit odd having the filter on a separate tab, but I just didn’t notice the dark-gray-on-black of the disabled-by-default main filter!

It still might be nice having an “only on gate” toggle for the EFX filter, though, since the current behavior is sort of unorthodox, and limits the filter’s use a little bit. A toggle between the current behavior and the more orthodox, proper behavior (self-resonance only sounds when noise is actually going through it, and self-resonance amplitude decays in volume in response to lesser intensity of the noise going through it) would be nice.

It would be a bad idea to do what you’re requesting. A person might not be aware of that feature because they don’t know normal modular jargon (“only on gate”) and they might enable it and then get behavior that they cannot understand.

If filter was among the last things of the signal path, they would experience their reverb & delay cutting out. And it might be quite frustrating to them to figure it out because they wouldn’t be able to connect it with a switch on a filter.

If it’s that important to you, you can use the master amplitude slider and modulate it with a gate-esque envelope to get some kind of approximation. Or alternatively do this with the “mix” knob of the filter, which actually would be probably best way to design this kind of behavior in the first place.

But I don’t really see any usecases for using the filter like that specifically. The signal path at that point is monophonic rather than polyphonic; for self-resonant oscillation, you would normally want to use the polyphonic filters in the first place and you can have your slides etc. And you got two filters anyway, if you want to filter out something with one of them.

The filter in the effects section is more useful for lowpassing & highpassing things when necessary