challism wrote:
You make a really good point (and nice graph, too). Thanks for sharing the analysis of your findings. You got me to thinking about it, and playing around with the filters yesterday. You are right, it is really quite good. I wonder how it compares to Etch Red? Etch Red is amazing. I have Etch Red, but I don't have that fancy graph making software. What are your thoughts vs Etch?
Thank you,
I have Etch Red too and I think it's great: is one of the first RE I've got!
In my opinion Etch Red and
FutzBox are hard to compare because they are two different beasts: the former is a dedicated modeled filters unit with impressive modulation capabilities (2 LFOs, Follower, Envelope, S&H and a wonderful matrix mod), the latter is more a collection of sound shaping tools in a box (gate, noise generator, speaker sims, bitcrusher, eq etc. without internal modulation capabilities), at least that's the way I see it.
Audiomatic is also different to me because it's inspired by an instagram workflow: put a predefined "shoot or character" to your sound do not tweak so much and see if it works ... so I would not say
FutzBox is Audiomatic on steroids, granted there are some few areas where they overlap each other.
Back on your question, Etch Red filters sounds amazing to me but please be aware that they are modeled! From the manual:
- the Japan type is based on the OTA (Roland Synths?)
- the SVF type is based on state-variable filter (Oberheim synths?)
- the Fatty is based on OTA Sallen-Key (Korg MS* synths?)
AFAIK, they are all famous vintage synthesizer filters (I still get excited like a kid whenever I think of that!
)
So, even without doing graphs, I guess I could safely say that they have been designed without a flat frequency response HPF/LPF in mind, that's why whenever I have to process an entire mix I prefer to use
FutzBox filter section or another dedicated transparent filtering RE unit.
In my experience Etch Red has more cpu footprint than
FutzBox.
I would love to see an "improved"
FutzBox version which could let the users to change lo-fi and SIM sections placement (for example, IMO it would be interesting to place the "lo-fi converter" before the SIM speaker!).
Anyway, like you and many others, I often find myself using
FutzBox SIM section alone (in dry/wet or parallel mode), while automating its tune parameter: on synths and pad it sounds crazy, I really like it!
Cheers,
Alessandro