Quote:
Originally Posted by Eliseat
SAI'KE!
Once again I have to say: You are crazy! Because my daughter got sick I'm at home and just tested the new Squashman update. Holy cow! Such an amazing distortion tool. I never ever saw something like this before and I'm surprised how useful it actually is. I'm very curious where this is going.
But - to be honest - it doesn't need more cowbell rather than an output level adjustment. 
(´-`).。ｏO(He probably thinks I'm crazy!)
Many thanks again, ... and again!
(Edit: Your example video sounds like early 90ies techno. Nowadays Techno only uses 127-130 bpm!  )
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'ello! Hope she gets well soon! And aren't we all a little crazy?
Cool. Glad you like it so far. There's more to come, but the code takes time and I'm bad at making decisions
Yes, gain levels, very important as this is once again a non-linear plug. I am actually still not sure how to best approach this, which is the main reason why it isn't in there yet.
So, the bands controls control drive which is just a pre-gain before the saturation component. One could do a compensating gain back down, but then the drive would act more like a ceiling which I think would be non-intuitive. Rather than make a band go up, the control would make it go down in volume, which would probably make a lot of people go "???".
Second option is total output gain compensation, but this is a tricky one for a different reason.
Each band has a certain slice of the frequency pie. So while the bands are limited by the saturator, it still means that if I'd push every band into saturation (-1 to 1), I'd end up with too much when adding them back. For five bands it'd be something like (-5 to 5). The problem is, I don't know how much one is nuking the band because I can never know the exact input level instantaneously. It's possible to make an estimate of this; but this would mean that the plugin would start acting as a compressor, which is not something I really want. I don't want it to start pumping just from the gain compensation...
The reason that this is not acceptable is because I want to have an optional compressor on each band as well. I want the dynamics to be user controlled rather than automatic. I think it would be very frustrating if you're "fighting" another compressor with the user set compressor.
Third option, which has my preference, would be to just leave it up to the user. Have the user control drive and such in the way it is currently implemented, and make a small post saturation EQ on the bottom bar where output level for each band can be adjusted post per-band-saturation. This small EQ would then also have a Master knob to manipulate the total gain. I could also make an AGC akin to Filther on this master gain, but this would be something that the user should explicitly turn off once settled on a sound (to avoid the dynamic compression effects).
I'm open to better suggestions; but I think I will first implement option 3 and see how that works out in practice.