The Akai S900/S950 Low Pass Filter

wavemartian wrote:I upgraded the s900 to OS4, which has the dynamic filtering, you need to use omniflop program and have an old computer with a floppy drive. I didn't realize you could get those funny 2 prong cords locally. When i was putting together a program last night i noticed some weird characters after the sample name
ie sample name: snare3 ^x at C3. Its the cross with the hat on; anyone know what this means. i will post a sound clip of sound examples of S900

I'm pretty sure that denotes hard/soft samples, something to do with the velocity crossfade thing.

I'm a bit confused about the 900 filter thing thats goin on here. I have 2 s900 (both have 1.2) and both have the filter. What they don't have is the ADSR for the filter but that function can be done when I boot with the os4 (justt like the list tells: DYNAMIC filter)

Ok back on topic:
another thing that should be kept in mind: page 15 in PRGM EDIT. In some cases the default setting of KEY = 50 is not useful and should be set to 0.
This setting is the amount the key (notenumber) influences the filter. The higher the notenumber the more open the filter. For instruments or synth sounds that will be played over a large keyrange this feature is cool but think about what happen if you have chops of a loop over 16 or more keys, all with the default settings and all with the same ffilter setting at ...lets say 50. All chops would have slightly diffent filtersettings because of the KEY function on page 15.

peace

I must admit to being a total novice on the S950 in terms of actually using it and setting up the filter. So any basic, intermediate and expert tips from you power users are much appreciated. Some good bits here already, thanks and keep it coming for us noobs!

Some dudes demoing the S950 filter.

Please dont hijack this thread. If you have nothing to say about S950 filter related issues, start a thread of your own.

Clint wrote:I must admit to being a total novice on the S950 in terms of actually using it and setting up the filter. So any basic, intermediate and expert tips from you power users are much appreciated. Some good bits here already, thanks and keep it coming for us noobs!

I have one more, it seems the filter cutoff is always linked to the starting playback pitch, even if the keyfilter is set to 0. You can test it out: trigger a loop and transpose upwards a few octaves as you hold it. then retrigger the same sound the filter opens up. if you do the same thing transposing down, retriggering will close the filter. I guess this another way of ensuring the aliasing noise is always filtered out.

I never really understood the hype around the 950 filter. Yes it sounds good but on the other hand its kind of limited in its range IMO. I never analyzed it really but to me it seem that some ranges of values doesn't have any effect on the filter (my 950 is not here atm so I can't test it right now).
Does the sound really change with settings between 0 and something like 15?
Does it change with settings between 90 and 99? (of course you need to sample at 19200 to get the most of the filter range but I still don't hear a change within this range)

Another thing I find kind of dissapointing is the lowest setting. The filter doesn't provide a cutoff that is really low. You always have some of the low mids included. A reason could be a low filter slope but IDK

I really like the range between 64 and 71. Depending on the sample, this setting gives a nice kind of "crunchy" high end IMO.

peace

Anyone willing to send me 1.4 on floppy? My s900 has 1.2 in it.

Honestly dont know anyone with a floppy PC :-/

Please can we keep this thread about the FILTER and related issues, it is not about floppies or floppy drives. Start another thread if you need to.

Thank you, again.

peterpiper wrote:I really like the range between 64 and 71. Depending on the sample, this setting gives a nice kind of "crunchy" high end IMO.
peace

Co-signing this. I like to overdrive samples when recorded so they distort a lil too much, then use The filter at a setting around 60-70 to clean out the high freq dist and bring out The crunch. I still don't think its THAT good at todays standards, it would be the shit if 0 actually ment 0, as in complete cutoff.

I think the 950.filter is perfect when u want that good old 90's style low pass.
U know like when the verse kicks in and its jus drums rockin and the filtered loop playin but u can still kinda hear the original melody resonating real softly in the background so u hum along head knoddin all over the place. Lol
But when u want to compeletly get rid of everything down to the low frequency to jus hard hitting bass notes. the Asr sp and mpc I think hit harder then the 950. 950 filter is smooth sounding more mid range if that makes any sense...

Hey wassup guys, first time poster here although I've been lurking on-and-off for quite a while now. Recently been trying to take making music a bit more seriously so I figured I should get myself on here and make the most of this place as a learning resource. Hopefully I'll be able to contribute a bit of my own knowledge too, although I'm still relatively new to this ish so we'll see how that goes...

Anyways I've run into problems using the low-pass filter on my S950. Essentially the will work fine for any values above a certain value of the filter parameter on page six of the "Edit Program" menu. Below this value I get a kinda high-pitched frequency whenever I play my sample.

If the filter parameter is the only thing I've change then this value is normally around 40, but this does change depending on the values of the other parameters which effect the low-pass. THe frequency is not effected by my original sample rate.

I had a search around the site and a few others and couldn't find anyone reporting the same problem although some people seemed to have related issues with the filter (although I can't seem to find those threads now )

So is this frequency caused by my using the filter wrongly? Am I missing a parameter somewhere or pushing the filter too hard? Or is this a problem with the actual hardware inside the 950 and how would I go about diagnosing this?

I've got a couple of ideas for work-arounds that would let me get rid of this frequency but if there's an easy or obvious solution I'd wanna try that first.

Reading this back I'm not quite sure how clear it is but whatever... Hopefully one of you peeps will have some idea what I mean, thanks in advance anyway...

I asked the same question when I first got mine. As far as I know all s950's do this. Why? I don't know. Simple fix is to just EQ out the highs