John Bowen Synth Design

John,

any news on how the Solaris is going to handle polyphony? For me, I'd probably never use more than 3 parts multitimbrality, so if the instruments polyphony is say 16, then it would be cool to be able to manually allocate the voices, eg:

1st part, 1 voice for a bass sound
2nd part, 10 voices for a pad sound
3rd part, 5 voices for a unison lead

It would probably require to manually adjust the range each sound plays on the keyboard, some sort of "zoning" as another user suggested. Also it would be great to be able to save and recall the voice allocation per preset, this way no-one has to worry about voice-stealing.

I would also be happy with a split/layer configuration. I think it's most important to do very high quality sounds at the expense of polyphony and not vice versa.

Again some suggestions.

Yannis

Dynamic complexity and voice allocation would be plain more simple to handle, i guess. I'm sure John Bowen thought about this.

Yes, we've discussed this, and I agree it would be handy to have some control over the number of voices assigned per part in a multi-timbre mode. Klaus said it might not matter, though (other than settings based on unison mode, etc.), as good dynamic allocation can 'cover' a lot of things.

Polyphony count is still expected to be 15-18 voices overall. The only way to increase it would be to run at a lower system clock rate (48 khz would about double things up), but so far, I'm opting for the higher system rate of 96 khz, hoping that the sound quality justifies the lower polyphony. (And I also asked about having a switch so the user could pick between these 2 rates, but it turns out, it becomes much more complicated than that, as for each rate he would actually need to create different algorithms of most all of the objects - osc, filters - to run optimally).

-JB

An average of 16 voices is great for such a complex instrument! I'm totaly satisfied! Agh! Can't wait!

16 is what I know from scope synths and is ok for the Solaris with a single preset.
For multitimbral use it seems not enough though.