2.37 keep in mind – the octave light
Michael Caluroso wrote:
Note that when you move the SEMITONE knob, there's an "OCT" LED that lights when the VCO is
tuned to an octave setting. I've grown used to it, and I own other synths like you're talking about. I
like the SEMITONE knob in place of octave buttons because it's quicker to dial up non-octave
intervals like fifths.
2.38 keep in mind – vco semitone knob will step
Justin wrote:
I had an original concern that Rezo cleared up for me, so I thought I would post it to the list:
When turning the osc knobs fast, I originally expected this to react like a traditional analog synth...a
smooth zip up and down the frequency. However, one must keep in mind the oscillators are set to
quantize to the nearest half note. Therefore turning the large knobs will stairstep
2.39 more than you wanted to know about soft sync:
From http://www.sequencer.de/efra.html
WHAT IS SOFTSYNC ? HOW DOES IT WORK?
I don't know much about how Soft-sync works but it does seem to change tone depending on how
the phase of the VCO waveforms are lined up. If I press it on, and off about ten times, you here a
different tone at each of the 1 tries. most of them similar, but a few of em will be heavily phase
cancelled and tiny. Is this how it works?
BTW
I have a saw on VCO1, and a square wave on VCO2, one octave down
Generally the way synch works when VCO2 is synched to VCO1, is that every time the VCO1
waveform has a positive-going zero crossing (i.e. begins its cycle), the waveform of VCO2 is reset
to the beginning of ITS cycle. That's hard synch. With soft synch, the VCO2 waveform does NOT
reset for every time VCO1 begins its cycle. It only resets if it is near the end of its cycle, and about
to reset anyway.
I'm not sure if that's correct; I believe that any sort of synch relies on the rising edge of the "master"
waveform to reset the phase of the "slave". In Soft Synch, the slave oscillator can be caused to
completely lock in phase with the master if their tuning relationships are consonant (octaves, fifths,
etc.) It is often neccessary to tune the slave oscillator flat several cents in order to achieve a lock.
Check "70's Lead" for a soft-sync'd sound and check the tuning of osc 2. Note that the timbre of a
soft-synch'd oscillator changes a bit, even if the master and slave are at the same frequency. In
hard sync, the slave becomes a generator of harmonics as it attempts to both freerun and also reset
to the rising edge of the master's waveform cycle.
Not all voices will accurately soft sync due to the compromise between the sensitivity requirements
of the circuit and the differences in tone which occur. It is an effect which is great for organ sounds
(pipe and otherwise) and for firmer bass sounds as well. I've found that if the slave is tuned -below-
the master, it will lock a bit better (and IIRC, it's tone is a bit cleaner.
If a slave is exactly twice the frequency of the master, it will produce two complete wavecycles in the
exact period of the master's one, with the rising and falling edges being the same for both at the
ends. This is useful when creating complex single-cycle waveforms for looping in small memory
spaces in ROMplers. Octloc (sp) in the QS synths was from Emerson's Moog Moduar, with three
921bs in soft sync, each an octave higher than the other. I had a sound, Morgan, in a factory set a
few revs ago, which was osc 2 soft sync'd to 1 but two octaves higher, both oscillator producing
square waves and the suboctaves at equal volume, for a 16-voice stack of four perfectly-in-phase
square waves. There were sounds like this as leads in the Morg Garson "Moog" records such as
Black Mass.
(One of the cooler features of the Wiard VCO is that there's a synch *pot*, which can be adjusted
from no synch, through varying degrees of soft synch with the threshold for oscillator reset being
changed, to rock-solid hard synchronization ... I don't know of any others that allow this.)
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