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NOX
IOUS - User Manual
Tips and Tricks
If you want to start making your presets for Noxious, there are a few tips, tricks and
starting points you might want to know.
Adjust the quality according to your bandwidth
The higher the quality the heavier will playing Noxious tax your CPU power. But increasing
partial count adds high frequencies that might not be audible, especially if you are using a
low pass filter further down the line. So as a final touch, try adjusting to the lowest partial
count.
The same thing applies to the precision. Try changing to the lowest quality to hear if there
are any differences. It will most noticeable if there are very fast variations of you spectrum,
because of high LFO or envelope rates, for instance.
Stealing high frequency partials with the Offset modifier
When your sound doesn't really need those high frequencies (because you're a huge fan
of dark resonant muted sounds) you can still use them for other purposes. With the
Offset
modifier you can move your partials down to lower frequencies and use them for good
effect, like fattening your sounds if you have previously slightly detuned them with the
Tune
modifier or add a touch of inharmonicity during the attack phase.
Attack partials with inharmonic wave forms
Starting with an inharmonic waveform is sometimes a great idea if you want to create nice
percussive sounds with a musical tone. If you apply a
Harmonize
modifier on an
inharmonic wave form and pull the intensity parameter to 100, you will hear the sound
transforming into a completely harmonic wave. Likewise, if you apply a
Harmonic Mix
modifier instead and put the mix parameter to 100, playing with the narrow parameter will
enable you to progressively remove the inharmonic partials.
With that in mind, it is easy to link one of the envelopes to the intensity or mix parameter,
depending on which modifier you are using, to make a sound that starts with a rich
inharmonic spectrum and gradually changes to a harmonic one.
A note on CPU / DSP performance
The CPU load of Noxious is directly proportional to the number of audible partials. Very
high frequency partials are not computed to save CPU time. Some wave forms, the offset
and tune modifiers,can lead to a great number of partials in the lower part of the spectrum
(The Strings, Dark Noise and Razor wave forms are the perfect examples). This implies
that most of the partials will always be audible and thus need more CPU power to render.
There is always a balance between spectrum richness in the lower end and CPU
performance. The most CPU demanding patch would be all the partials tuned or offset in
the lower part of the spectrum, in high partial count and high precision quality settings.
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