Single Knob Filter (or: my first VST worth releasing)

UPDATE: The SKF project is now hosted at Google Code!

Are you laptop a DJ? Do you love the filters on the Pioneer DJM-800 mixer? Then this plugin is for you! Single Knob Filter, as the name implies, is a low/high-pass filter controlled by a single knob. Besides the obvious economy in knob assignment real-estate (come on, not everyone has a Drehbank!), it’s perfect for filtersweeps that make everybody on the floor put their hands in the air… you know, like they just don’t care.

Turn the Filter knob to the left for low-pass and to the right for high-pass. The Reso knob adds more resonance to the filters (and boy, it adds a lot - going almost into self-oscillation! SQUEAL, PIGGY!). Before anyone asks: yes, that makes it a filter with two knobs, but “low/high pass filter controlled by one knob plus resonance” is too big for a name. Besides the important part is controlled by a single knob. That’s the whole point, in case you missed it. ;-)

Read on to know how the SKF came into being.

I’ve been playing with Synthedit for a while, but most of my plugins until now were quite specific and mostly useless for everyone else. But things change! Last month I was reading the Ableton forum and someone asked if it was possible to create a single-knob low/high-pass filter (like the one on Pioneer DJM800 mixer) using only Live’s racks.

The solution presented worked, but it was rather clunky (a rack with 127 different filter instances!) and didn’t sound very good on extreme low-pass sweeps (there are loud pops when Live changes from one filter instance to another). Some people offered other solutions (me included), but none of them sounded quite right. At this point I decided to drop the Ableton-specific solution and go VST. I fired up Synthedit and some hours later I had a working solution.

The zip file includes the Synthedit source file. Yep, this plugin it’s open-source - released under the GPL 2, to be more precise. You can alter it at will and even include it in your own plugins if you like. The only condition is that you release your own sources under the same license.

The only downside of using Synthedit is that the plugin is Windows-only… but if I find a way to translate the schematics to something that works on Macs, I’ll do it.

Thu 11 | Jan/2007 | Tags: English, Production, VST

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