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loud clicks....and a long post, sorry

PostPosted: Fri Jul 25, 2003 7:49 am
by sampleandhold
okay. this might go with the loud sound burst thread. but i really don't know. this is something slightly different from what i have read.

I have this choon that i am working on. and of course i am working with sounds that i have created from test tones, and also a drum track that is actualy made up of about five different breaks. so in this drum track i have two kicks being hit at once. one is lowpassed so that any cymbals or high end transiants are gone. i used that to give the original kick more presence. that is really the only important aspect of the break that is needed to be understood.

now for my bass patch. i have four voices there, i will have to look again, but i believe those, or some are being lowpassed to give it the particular sound i wanted. i could be wrong.. i can't really remember right off hand. and my lead is just the same sound pitched up of course.

in the middle section of my song, i go into the drums, the bass, and the duplicated bass lead all together. about every measure there is a loud click that hits when the lead, the bass and the kick are all triggered. this phenominam was present with the lead and bass alone, but not quite so hard hitting, and very rare. and it only clicked when both the lead and bass hit the same time. just like with the kick. if the notes are being held and the drum plays on, there is no clicking when the kick hits. another thing is, when i do a lpf sweep on the drums, the kicks produce loud clicks as they sweep down while being played over the top of the bass and the lead notes that are being held.

so i think the problem lies with the lowpass filter, but perhaps not completely. i believe this is an artifact of some sort.

what i have in common with all these sounds are as follows. they all had to have their attacks trimmed so i could hit a zero crossing for the waves, and the kicks were in the middle of a break so i of course had to cut those in a way that the kick's attack would sound and not the "dead" space before it.

what i am thinking is this: the lowpass filter amplifies the missed zero crossings in certian circumstances. and because of all these voices are being played at once. a total of ten, and with lowpasses in sync, there is an extremely loud click. i do not believe this is a side effect of a massive amount of polyphony because i have made complicated waves that have several voices and there was never a click. but then they didn't have lowpass filters closed on any of it.

another reason why i believe it is the lowpass filter: when i chop a break, like the amen, i would take the pieces and reconstruct them at the tempo my sampler said they were at from the beat mugger. then what i would do is lowpass them. i discovered that if i cut the break somewhat sloppy, i would get clicks as each sample went by. i mean loud clicks. as if i missed a zero crossing. but when the samples are played together with an open filter. it sounded as fluent as the orginal break. not much issue hear since the breaks are sped up and thus are not aloud to play through their entirety.

and in realality, this issue is not much of one since i record 1 track at a time, and there is no loud clicking going on. i feel that the issue lays in a slightly closed lowpass filter (anything other than a frequency of 200000), like the kick. i am almost certian if i resampled that kick, i would not have the clicking issue at all.

i will play around with this, and see what kind of things i can find out. and maybe you guys would have some ideas too. and if you suffer from those loud sound burst... maybe you can find something in common, like perhaps multiple uses of filters on several tracks at once.

mmmmm.. sorry for the long post. :sad: just wanted to throw this out at you guys. oh and i am using 4.1 by the way.....

errr....yeeehhh.

PostPosted: Mon Jul 28, 2003 7:23 pm
by blaze
cant give an extravagant answer as yur post deserves but i found that poorly chopped samples(bad zero crossings) gave me clicks when i used a low pass but were fine when i used a different filter, so its not unheard of.go back and ensure all samples are click free on there own.... 8-)

PostPosted: Tue Aug 12, 2003 6:10 am
by MindMech
I'm having a click problem myself, when using Multiple Trigger solo mode in association with most of the filter types except High Pass. The click happens when one note is being held and another is hit. But it doesn't happen every time. Maybe 50% of the time. I can't figure this one out.... REALLY pissing me off though. Any ideas?!?

By the way, the click happens with only a single layer, so polyphony is unrelated... The sample in this particular case is a looped saw wave.

PostPosted: Tue Aug 12, 2003 6:39 am
by MindMech
The plot thickens considerably:

I just discovered that setting the voice from Submix 1 to Main made my click disappear....

Could this have anything to do with the RFX-32 card? I just got it last week and I don't seem to remember this click happening before I got the card. But then again, I might not have been paying attention...

PostPosted: Tue Aug 12, 2003 5:05 pm
by sampleandhold
i wouldn't think that it has anything to do with your rfx card. i am having the clicks going through my main. it seems to get worse the more sounds i add on top of each other. so bad infact that for the song i am making, i decided against using my monitors, and just use headphones until i go to audio.

see i have two kicks layered on top of each other. one that is low pass a little, and when i play that ontop of my bass patch that i made, i get a loud click about every other measure. and if i lowpass, all hell breaks loose. but the funny thing is, when i play each sound alone, i hear no clicks. i am going to try to remove the lowpass kick and see what happens. if the clicking goes away, then i would figure that it has something to do with layering sounds on one voice, and using filters, for some reason. i am still thinking about this one though, and i think to night i am realy going to mess around with it. hopefully we can get this sorted.

PostPosted: Tue Aug 12, 2003 5:23 pm
by MindMech
I did more experimenting on my end, and it *definitely* has to do with effects for me. The click only happens if I turn up the reverb send (that's why it wasn't happening on main out -- I had effects on the main out disabled)... Weird?!?