PAuKn - The Pitched Audio Knife

Control the pitch of various pitched base effects (the dwgs and granulator are neat) with MIDI and note expression in VST3.

Effects

• Granulator - Breaks the input into grains which are cycled through
• Biquad filter - Includes bandpass, notch, lowpass, and hipass filter
• Comb - A delay based comb filter
• Decimator - Sample and hold.
• DWGS - Digital waveguide synthesis. Simulating a string which is excited by the input.
• Sync - Sync oscillator. Zero crossings in the input reset the phase of a carrier oscillator. Tracks envelope of input.

Controlling PAuKn

Inputs

| ID | Name | Description | |---|---|---| | MIDI 0xE0 | Pitchbend | Always changes pitch of all up to range controlled by pitchbend range param | | Note Expression ID | Description | Notes | | NE0 | Gain | Always changes gain | | NE1 | Pan | Doesn't change pan, used by different effects as below | | NE2 | Tuning | Always changes pitch by standard amount, not affected by pitchbend range | | NE3 | Vibrato | not used | | NE4 | Expression | not used | | NE5 | Brightness or Timbre | Used by effects as below |

What the inputs do for each effect

| | Granulator | Biquad filter | Comb | Decimator | DWGS | Sync | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | MIDI note | grain length | cutoff | delay line length | sample frequency | delay line length | carrier osc frequency | | Tuning NE2 | " | " | " | " | " | " | | Pitchbend | gain step | " | " | " | " | " | | Velocity | - | Q | feedback | # bits | loss | carrier shape | | Poly Pressure | grain crossover | " | " | " | " | " | | Sensitivity param | - | " | " | " | " | " | | Gain NE0 | gain | gain | gain | gain | gain | gain | | Pan NE1 | grain step | - | - | - | string lopass | trigger level | | Timbre NE5 | grain rate | - | - | - | string inpos | - |

Parameters

Tuning and volume are global. Additional parameters are below.

Biquad Parameters

• biquad stages - # of stages, which affects the resonance and rolloff

Sync Parameters

• shape - varies the carrier osc smoothly from atriangle wave to square-ish wave
• trigger level - resets phase of carrier osc when this signal level is crossed
• env time - the time constant of envelope tracker

DWGS Parameters

• inpos - position of input on string
• loss - loss at string terminal
• lopass - lopass filter falloff at string terminal
• anharm - string anharmonicity

Granulator Parameters

• rate - how fast to advance the grains through the buffer
• crossover - how much to smooth between grains
• step - how much to step through the grain each tick
• size - the total buffer length to be filled, in beats

Plugin support

Originally written and used in Cubase VST2. Rewritten for VST3 SDK and tested on Ableton Live 11, where MPE doesn't work, and on Bitwig where note expression works.

Installation

Requires vst3sdk. CMake should acquire the package from git or you can specify -DVST3_SDK_DIR=<dir> to cmake.

git clone https://github.com/claytonotey/paukn.git
cd paukn
cd build-<platform>
. build.sh
make -j 4

And you should have a VST3/paukn.vst3 in your build directory, which you can move where you please.