SpectMorph 1.0.0-beta1

A new version, SpectMorph 1.0.0-beta1 is available at www.spectmorph.org.

The new features of this release are described in a YouTube Tutorial.

SpectMorph (CLAP/LV2/VST plugin, JACK) is able to morph between samples of musical instruments. A standard set of instruments is shipped with SpectMorph, and an instrument editor is available to create user defined instruments from user samples.

The first lines of code for SpectMorph were written in 2009. I also worked full time on SpectMorph for my university thesis. There were many incremental improvements over the years, so at this point, the next stable release of SpectMorph will be 1.0.0. I’d like SpectMorph-1.0.0 to be as stable as possible, so if you test the beta1 version and have any issues with it, please let me know.

In this release, two formant preserving algorithms for repitching vocals were added to the WavSource operator. This means that for user defined vocal instruments, good sound quality over a large midi note range is possible with only a single sample as base. Also with these algorithms enabled, portamento will dynamically adjust the spectral envelope, which means that it sounds more natural.

There are a lot of instruments which have good sound quality only for a certain pitch range. For instance, a trumpet will sound great for high notes, but for low notes, a tenor trombone or bass trombone sounds better. The same is true for bass, tenor and soprano voices. A new KeyTrack operator was added to handle these cases by combining multiple instruments by midi note range. Note that this is not a simple key split, because slopes can be used to morph between the instruments for seamless transitions.

Finally, SpectMorph now supports arbitrary user defined curves. A new Envelope operator was added for modulation envelopes with user defined curves, and the LFO operator also supports them.

If you are interested in a detailed list of changes, you can look at the NEWS file.

If you are interested in even more details, some SpectMorph related issues were discussed in the regular Anklang/SpectMorph developer meetings.