What’s new in DrumSpillage 1.3? This:

LFO Tempo Synchronization

Many of you have requested this feature at various points in the last 12 months but one man in particular was so persistent that we decided to slip this feature into DrumSpillage sooner than originally planned.

Syncing the LFO to host tempo is easy and you get a good range of sync timings. Simply turn on the sync using the ‘metronome’ icon next to the frequency box (the frequency slider will now be ‘greyed out’). The frequency box changes and now acts as a pop up menu control. Use the menu to select the time interval (from 32 bars to 128th notes). Triplet and dotted values are also provided.

Once implemented we were very pleasantly surprised by the results. For example, dubbed-out triplet filter and pitch modulations are simple to create. The other big bonus is that modulations can now translate to any tempo without tweaking LFO frequencies by hand. Great for sound designers and when building preset banks.

Envelope Tempo Synchronization

Once we had the LFO tempo locks up and running we thought we were ready to go ahead and release the update. However, more individual persistence turned our heads a little and we became aware of the benefits of also synchronizing the envelopes to the host tempo. The interface is basically the same as for the LFOs.

As an example, the ability to set an exact envelope attack time makes creating reversed drum type sounds that also translate across different tempi beautifully simple. Alternatively, booming sub-bass drums can have their release phase timed perfectly to 1 bar, 1 beat or whatever takes your fancy. You can also create gated type effects by locking the decay stage to 8th or 16th notes whilst setting a fast release time.

16 Outputs

DrumSpillage can now use up to 16 individual outputs allowing you to route every pad in a kit to it’s own mixer channel in your host app for further processing.

Improved Freeze Support

When pad freezing was introduced in 1.2 the GUI would simply display ‘parameters frozen’ for the relevant interface sections. This has been greatly improved so that now the affected parameters are simply ‘greyed out’ in the interface and no-longer respond to mouse events.

This allows you to examine a frozen pad to see what’s going on under the hood without having to un-freeze and subsequently re-freeze the pad.

Final Word

Thanks goes to James Kojac/Syndicate Synthetique for pushing the lfo and envelope tempo lock ideas: http://synsynth.net/