John Bowen Synth Design

And now back to the specifications:

Today I received another update to the OS - this one adds several additional oscillator modes:

1) a 'supersaw' type
2) 'Morphing' sine-to-saw or sine-to-square (as in the plug-in)
3) Emulation of a Mini's oscillator, with the 6 discreet waveshapes

The detune of the Supersaw is fun as you can modulate it. It's a bit late here now, but tomorrow I'll work on some short examples of these new forms to post online.

best regards,
john b.

'Morphing' sine-to-saw or sine-to-square (as in the plug-in)

Cool! Can it be modulated? If so, is it glitch-free?

Talking about supersaws reminded me of a flaw that the JP-8000 has. It's filter self-oscillates but in doing so it consumes all the available headroom and under specific settings it clips. It's all about headroom which leads me to think...

is there ample headroom in the Solaris? Obviously wherever digital mixers are implemented, you can't have everything at 24bit, otherwise it would cause overflow. I haven't studied the Solaris' internal flow (I am at work now) but it something that should be kept in mind. With 4 oscillators and feedback and self oscillating filters and what-have-you, it's very easy to consume all the available headroom. And we know that digital distortion is ugly.

Just another suggestion, of course.

Regards,
Yannis.

ThreeFingersOfLove wrote:

'Morphing' sine-to-saw or sine-to-square (as in the plug-in)

Cool! Can it be modulated? If so, is it glitch-free?

Yes, easy to modulate, it's just the Shape parameter. Glitch-free? Do you mean in transition, or? It's certainly as smooth and glitch-free as it's always been - but I realize there's quite a few here who aren't familiar with the Scope synth devices.

john b.

Yes, I was reffering to the transition. Also is it sine to saw or sine to saw to tri to pulse to whatever?

It's a sine-to-saw or sine-to-square output.

john b.

Last week I received yet another OS update. I can now play with the WAV Osc, using some built-in samples for playback. We also have the following filters modes added: SSM (Solid State Music, used in the Rev1 & Rev2 Prophets), Mini (used in the Minimax), and Comb/Tube.

I wanted to ask this of my readers to this Forum - I'm not aware of any, but does anyone know of a product that allows audio rate modulation of samples. (I admit, I have not researched this yet - maybe Kurzweil has this function?).

I'm wanting to know, because given the Scope platform's way of playing back samples, I've never been able to have a true, smooth modulation of samples, especially one sample modulating another, and I'd like to know if there's been any experimentation with this on other platforms. It seems to work fairly well in the Solaris (!), and I think this could be quite fun to explore in the future.

cheers,
john b.

With the Ensoniq ASR-X has something called 'transwaves' where sample start position can be modulated (or it might even be current playback index), I'm not sure if it's audiorate.

There's several software applications that can do this, but of course fast access to RAM is one of software's upsides: Max+MSP & PureData can, Reaktor can, Kontakt3 might be able to to with its scripting, though not modulate one from another, Bidule can to some degree (its built in support for sound design is deep but narrow)... I seem to recall something about Crono-X possibly offering that but I haven't used it. I'm sure there's a few vst's I'm forgetting I don't pay attention to them all.

If you guys have this working in Solaris hopefully someday some of that can make its way back into the sample playback modules in Scope Modular shell (or new modules).

Modulating the sample start point is spec'ed for the Solaris, but I don't have that in this latest OS. That's something I've had in my product design back to the Prophet 2000 days...however, that is not the issue I'm discussing, but rather, frequency modulation at audio rates from any source (including another sample osc). Most systems I've heard produce a sort of 'struggling' sound when trying to do this.

-john b.

John Bowen wrote:... frequency modulation at audio rates from any source (including another sample osc).

I remember trying similar in my SY77, and quickly deciding that FM between two complex waves doesn't make much sense. Too many FM harmonics = trashy "distorted" sound.

Howard,

Yes, I think this is the general consensus - seems to be best to keep it simple, as is often the case.

-jb

Cronox is one my favourite softsynths. It can do modulation of the start time of a wave but only at lfo rates. FM is available to sample oscillators but as suggested earlier, this often results in unusable sounds (for my taste anyway).

Audio rate modulation of the sample start or loop start could be pretty cool though, is that do-able (would it delay things!)

V.

vince66 wrote:Audio rate modulation of the sample start or loop start...

Sample start modulation only makes sense at Note On (update a single value), and loop position modulation (loop start + loop end) just might be useful in realtime for V-Synth / Transwave type effects, but I don't think it would need to be audio rate. IMHO

I would love to have loop point manipulation/modulation (see my "story" about developing the Wavestation samples over in the JB Chronicles topic viewtopic.php?t=460), but I don't believe Klaus is able to do that in time for the first release (if at all). I'll have to bring this up, as we hadn't discussed it for Solaris.

john b.

John Bowen wrote:
I wanted to ask this of my readers to this Forum - I'm not aware of any, but does anyone know of a product that allows audio rate modulation of samples. (I admit, I have not researched this yet - maybe Kurzweil has this function?).

john b.

Hi John,

Maybe the Casio Phase distrotion can be seen as an audiorate modulation of sample though the sample wave here are more digital single cycle waveforms.

As already mentionned, this can be seen as a PWM applied to a non square waveform.

This kind of feature would be great !!!

CheerZ

just out of curiosity as the first "final" version of the OS is specified and to a substantial extent coded:

where are we resourcewise, john?
how much CPU power is allocated in 1.0 already? or the other way round: how much % is left for additional functionality?

thanks