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We're excited to announce a new plugin today, which is the product of a multi-year collaboration with the artist and composer Dr. Steffen Krebber. It is an extension of his algo-rhythmic theory by the name of "Sinusoidal Run Rhythm" or SRR for short. You can tell by the backward letters on Steffen's website that we were destined to work together, and it's been a very fun process! I mean, how often do you get to work on an entirely new and novel theory of musical rhythm?
So who is this made for? Well, if you're a fan of Euclidean Rhythms but find them a bit limited or stale through overuse (that's high praise Dr. Toussaint!), you'll probably delight in SRR. What's unique about this theory, is that the resulting waveforms generally have amplitude patterns built in, separate from the base rhythm itself. Basically, there are accents and velocity patterns, so it sounds much more groovy than binary on/off beats. The visual version of the curves give you an idea of the geometric beauty of the underlying shapes, so we made sure to feature them prominently on the interface. It's honestly quite fun just scrolling presets or randomizing and looking at the shapes while listening to how they sound.
Who else is this made for? People who liked trance gates and miss them and would love a more flexible, modern, "liquid" version of a similar idea. People who have a soft-spot for the legendary Alligator, etc.
Besides amplitude, we've mapped SRR's patters to our fast-modulation-friendly filters, specifically the set recently used in Battalion, so you can apply these rhythms as offsets to the frequency setting of LP/HP/BP filters, creating wild effects. It sounds great on guitar and other solo instruments. For ensembles or full mixes, you can apply the SRR curve to panning and binaural amplitude in low amounts, to get a heightened sense of space. It's surprisingly effective when dialed in, and is probably my new favorite way to use the plugin. It also makes me want to create a dedicated spatializer plugin using 3D versions of these curves, so...
The Binaural mode is particularly fun, as it's not truly "binaural" but has a similar perceptual effect, so we decided to use that name. Essentially it causes the right channel to use opposite phase from the left channel, meaning when one goes up, the other goes down. Think panning unbalanced and more extreme, kind of a hyper-pan. Side note: TIL that the composer Alvin Lucier was messing with binaural beats before they were cool.
Not to mention that all of these effects can be used together in fluid amounts, so a touch of filter modulation can be used with a dash of pan, some binaural, and a lot of classic amplitude. The result is a system of movement that not only appears linked and makes sense audibly, but also sounds new and unique. Fast modulation on the filter can even sound like feedback or delay, so you'll hear some of those sounds on the various presets as well. It's surprising how versatile this algorithm is when applied to different targets of control.
Speaking of control, we knew that producers/composers would want to be able to quickly wrangle a suite of SRR instances using one source of truth, so we implemented a custom method for cross-instance control. It not only works between instances of SRR, but also between SRR and SRRMIDI, so you can have one leader controlling many followers, even between plugin types. It was a looooot of work to make that compatible with all DAWs and Apple's sandboxing rules and whatnot, so we're proud that the result is as solid as it is. TLDR: you can link multiple instances of SRR.
Wait, we forgot to mention there's a separate MIDI specific version of the plugin! Yes, that's a thing. It allows you to gate MIDI notes and to control things like CC curves and pitch/pressure. You could even do something as crazy as hooking it up to control a drum synth like Battalion if you're craving an easier way to have more than one pattern at a time (yes, I promise we're still working on the pattern system).
It was an honor to help popularize Steffen's work, so we can't wait to see what you create with it. As we say in the preface to the manual and product page:
"It is often said that the quality of an algorithm is the ratio between the simplicity of a formula and the number of real-world phenomena it can recreate or approximate. By this measure, SRR is of the highest caliber: from a simple mathematical model, it generates microtemporal rhythmic grids that are not only strikingly groovy, but also offer a distinct interpretation of metric structures - structures that can be found in diverse musical genres from all over the world."
Talking about musical effects is like dancing about architecture though, so we'll leave you with one of Steffen's compositions where he uses the SRR algorithm, which can explain it much better than anything. Have you ever heard anything like this? To me it's almost an entirely new realm of sound, and makes me see a world of uncharted sonic possibilities. Blows my mind. We've only started scratching the surface of this algorithm, so we can't wait to continue exploring and hear what others discover.
- Josh
