Blue Velvet Soft-Clip Mixer

utdgrant · Post by **utdgrant** » Thu Feb 16, 2023 8:34 pm

Dome Music Technologies has just released the Blue Velvet Soft Clip Mixer.

It was originally inspired by the CP3 mixer in the Moog 900 series. This was the 'secret sauce' of many Moog owners, including the late Mark Shreeve of Redshift. Anyhow, it's effectively a three-channel mixer which feeds into a soft-clipping distortion stage. This can provide subtle warming effects at low gain settings, or very aggressive brick-wall clipping at high gain.

There is also a bias control, which allows you to shape the soft clip transfer function from symmetrical through to heavily asymmetric diode-like behaviour. You can achieve some interesting West-Coast dynamic wave-shaping effects by feeding a control voltage into the 'Direct' input channel.

I used the R_OpenLib oversampling library to provide support for x2 to x16 oversampling. This can be used to eliminate any aliasing which might arise as a result of the extra harmonics which distortion inevitably creates. Note however that the oversampling switch is not a 'quality' setting - only use it in those cases where it can help to remove unwanted sidebands, and leave it off by default. Big shout out to Chris Neuberger of R_Ware for developing R_OpenLib and allowing its use by all developers, completely free-of-charge.

And while we're at it, a big thank you also to ColinP of Adroit Synthesis who described a low-CPU method for calculating a cubic sigmoid function. This was a perfect fit for the transfer function I required to implement the soft-clipping algorithm in Blue Velvet.

There is also a Preset Pack with some demonstrations of how to use the module within patches. All presets have been designed to use only free-of-charge modules from VM Nucleus and the Dome Music Technologies Freebie Collection.

The module itself is only $1 and, as with all Dome Music Technologies products, there is a 28 day demo period to allow you to 'try before you buy'.

A comprehensive user guide is available on my website.

There is also a short YouTube demo of Blue Velvet in action.