Audio Damage Update : Kombinat...

I spent the whole day finishing the UI for Kombinat and chopping it in to little pieces for VSTGUI. Once I got that done, I decided to have a little fun and make the traditional glamour shot a little early. In the process, I got some fancy new lighting profiles in to 3DS Max, which gave me (and the image) some warm fuzzies.

Whack that image above, and you can see the full-sized PNG in all its… err… glamour. It is easily large enough to make out all the controls, and it should be fairly apparent what’s going on. A brief rundown of the signal path follows:

1. Equalizer: If you have Live, this will be immediately obvious. It is essentially exactly the same as the little 3-band “EQ Three” DJ EQ in that DAW, with the exception that you can gain the bands a bit more, for the purposes of overdriving the distortion engines. On the bottom of this section, you’ll note the “MODE” switch. In “MULTI” mode, each band gets one distortion engine. In “SERIES” mode, you get the EQ, then all three engines in series. This obviously means massively huge signal destruction.

2. Distortion: These are the three distortion engines, obviously. As you can see in the image, there are eight possible configurations for each engine. If you’re one of the few people that bought our first product, the Mayhem suite (no longer available, obviously) you’ll note that each engine contains Master Destrukto in its entirety. There is also a fairly cool ring mod, the distortion part of FuzzPlus, and a custom “gating” distortion block which follows the modern boutique pedal trend currently making the rounds. The number of knobs available changes depending on the type selected, from one (FUZZ) to three (RING). There is also a pass-through, called THRU, amusingly enough.

3. Output: Here’s where the magic happens. The “FILTER” section is the 4PLP self-resonating model from Dr. Device. No particular reason to include it in this unit except that everything is more fun with a fat-ass lowpass filter in it. Under that is the “COMPRESSION” knob, which loosely follows the compressor found in ReBirth in all its single-control glory. It basically goes from “off” to “more.” The “INPUT” knob can overdrive the whole unit (coupled with the gain knobs in the EQ section, you get a total of 14db of gain over unity), and “OUTPUT” is obvious. The whole mess has a nice clipper.

So, there you have it. We still have about a week of work on the Windows version, then however long the OS X stupidity takes. (Anyone that is a frequent reader will know this is completely unpredictable.) Kombinat will be US$49.00. I’ll start putting up samples next week, once we have everything tuned to taste.