I don't think I can catch up the utz's latest mindblowing developments, but the way I think I can still contribute to development of the 1-bit music scene is to streamline the old ideas. So I was playing around with the Ear Shaver engine that I made a few years back. It never got enough love, and I was unsure on what it can provide beyond its EarthShaker roots. Lately I was making various sketches with it, and felt it actually hides a ton of potential, it just takes time to master. So I got ideas on how to improve it here and there, then the sample drums improvement idea come to the mind, and here is the outcome.
I'm kinda hyped up with the result, so I'd call it something like Earth Shaker Ultra or Ultimate, or Uberengine, but in its core it is still the same code and framework as in the original Ear Shaver. So let's it be EX, as it is still well suited to shave your ears (capable of many bizzare sounds), and we should save Uber for later, as I believe there is lot more to be achieved.
So, what's so special here? We have 4 engines in 7 flavors all in one, with capability to switch between these every row. Not that we weren't trying to do it before, but prior developments were difficult to match to the tracker concept to utilize their potential. This one managed to have very streamlined controls, basically nothing but the drum section changed from the original Ear Shaver - just two note channels with detune and waveform columns.
The engines are:
1: EarthShaker-alike, works exactly as in the Ear Shaver, with W column
used to control the phase precisely (helps to separate repeating notes
and to get specific sound harmonics);
2: Tritone-alike, with two channels of uneven volume. The W column controls
duty cycle here. T2 channel is louder than T1 channel;
3: The same as 2, but with equal volumes on both channels;
4: The same as 2, but T1 plays quiet periodic noise instead of tone, the
color of the noise depends on the note played. T1 plays loud tone;
5: The same as 4, but noise played on T2 instead, making it louder than
tone that is played on the T1 channel;
6: Phaser1-alike. It is a single channel mode, both channels providing
frequencies for each of the oscillators. The W column controls phase,
allowing to get the whole spectrum of Phaser1 sounds;
7: Squeeker-alike. Provides two channels with the Squeeker-specific timbre,
both channels allow to use the W column to control duty cycle.
The drums got support for 4 volume levels, 9 pseudo pitch levels (not a real pitch shift), and 9 sample offsets. So you can create pretty diverse percussion soundscape using just a few samples.
The engine is very fresh, I just got the parts together, and hurry to share it with the world. So probably some issues are there (drum timing compensation perhaps?). Will be testing it more extensively sometime later.
For now here is the script and a rough test.
