Sonic Charge has announced the release of µTonic 3.0, an upgrade to its virtual drum machine instrument for Windows and Mac.
It is out. Sonic Charge µTonic version 3.0. The first major upgrade to our flagship drum machine in over five years. And what an upgrade it is. Sporting over 20 new features and a brand new look, µTonic is as good as new again.
Changes in µTonic v3.0
- A morph slider allows you to interpolate all eight drum patches simultaneously between two end-points. You can edit the drum patches with the morph slider at any position and it will adjust the interpolation end-points accordingly. Morph is an automatable and MIDI controllable parameter, so it can be used both as a performance parameter as well as an editing feature.
- Matrix editor window for viewing and editing the pattern steps of all eight drum channels simultaneously. (Bonus feature: you can drag channel labels to reorder the drum channels of the preset.)
- MIDI Program Change message support for instantaneously switching between up to 16 different presets (loaded into memory). (It is also possible to switch programs with MIDI notes.)
- Drag and drop patterns as MIDI files directly into your sequencer (supported by all major hosts).
- “Edit All Channels” button enables adjusting parameters for all drum channels simultaneously. E.g. turn up the distortion on all channels. µTonic will write parameter automation for all affected channels, so the effect can be automated.
- A new “choke group” feature lets you assign two or more channels that should play mutually exclusively and cut each other off. Useful for closed and open hi-hats for example.
- A preset name display sits in the top of the window, with previous and next preset buttons and a popup list when you click the display.
- Support for MIDI Pitch Wheel for real-time pitch transposition with a range of up to 2 octaves.
- A new “Stop Voices with MIDI Note Off” option makes it possible to sustain the sound while you hold down MIDI keys (if you use µTonic as a synth). It is also useful for changing the length of drum sounds with note lengths in your sequencer.
- Alternative “pattern launch modes”: “Switch Next” (the behavior in earlier versions of µTonic), “Switch Directly”, “Retrigger” and “Retrigger Gated”.
- Undo / redo.
- Shift-click menu buttons to quickly repeat last selected menu item.
- New 3D-rendered skin. Sharper, brighter, sexier with 32-bit graphics. (Yes, µTonic version 2.0 was using 20th century 16-bit RGB graphics still).
- Lots more.
µTonic for PC and Mac (VST/AU) is available to purchase for $99 USD + VAT. The update is free for registered customers (100% backwards compatible with µTonic 2.0).
Sonic Charge has also released Bitspeek, a real-time pitch-excited linear prediction codec effect.
Linear prediction coding is a voice compression technology that appeared in commercial products in the seventies and was implemented in some well-known speaking toys of the early eighties.
We have applied this technology to create a VST / AU effect plug-in that analyzes audio, extracts a number of parameters (including pitch, volume and formant data) and then resynthesizes the audio using a simple oscillator, noise and filter architecture.
We have added a number of playback parameters that adjusts the pitch and tonal quality of the sound as well as support for MIDI and a beat-synchronized “formant freezing effect”. Despite having only a few simple controls, this box can produce a broad range of sounds from cheap speaking toys to high-end vocoder and talkbox effects.
Bitspeek for PC and Mac (VST/AU) is available to purchase for $29 USD + VAT.
More information: Sonic Charge
