SQ-80 — Musician's Manual
• An Inharmonic Loop is a relatively long portion of a sampled sound which is "looped" or repeated
over and over. It is similar to a Waveform, but where a Waveform is one wavecycle of a sound repeated
endlessly, an Inharmonic Loop contains many wavecycles of the sound. A waveform can capture the
basic timbral characteristics of a sound, but when a single cycle of a wave is played over and over you
lose any sense of randomness or movement within the sound. A long, multi-cycle loop can contain
frequencies which are inharmonics — not exact multiples of the fundamental frequency. A Waveform
by definition cannot contain such frequencies. A Waveform is static; an Inharmonic Loop is dynamic.
Inharmonic Loops can capture the subtle shifts in the character of a sound which occur over time. They
account for the SQ-80's ability to create a certain class of "atmospheric" sounds not possible with
Waveforms.
Multi-cycle Inharmonic Loop
The only drawback of these types of Waves is that, being much longer pieces of sound, they take up an
enormous amount of memory compared to waveforms. Thus you are limited to a smaller number of
them.
The SQ-80 has 5 Inharmonic Loops. These particular Waves have been optimized to add breath,
movement and complexity to a sound — you can create all sorts of ear-grabbing textures by using
different combinations of Inharmonic Loops and Waveforms for the sustain segments of your sounds.
• A Transient Attack is the very first portion of a sound — the scratch of a bow, the pluck of a
string, the strike of a mallet, etc. A real sampled attack at the beginning of a sound tends to be more
sonically interesting and "punchier
"
than a synthesized attack. The SQ-80's various Transient Attack
Waves can be combined with the other types of waves (or with each other) to create a wide variety of
or very unusual sounds. This is the essence of
CrossWave
TM
synthesis — crossfading these
sampled attacks with the various Waveforms and
Inharmonic Loops to create new sounds.
The Transient Attack Waves are not looped:
unlike the other types of Waves in the SQ-80,
they play through once and stop. They provide
the attack transients of the sound, and then other
Waves can be used for the sustain portion.
The SQ-80 has 11 Transient Attack Waves (not
counting the Drums).
• There is one more special category of Waves in the SQ-80 — Drum/Attacks. These Waves are
actual sampled Drum sounds. They can be used as Drums or as Transient Attack Waves within other
types of sounds. The last five Waves (DRUMS 1-5) combine the different Drum/Attack Waves in
various configurations to give you an entire multisampled drum set just by selecting a single Wave.
Section 3
Voice Pro
rammin
31
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