John Bowen Synth Design

Hi John

When you refer to "sample playback" as one of the oscillator types, are you referring to traditional instrument samples that one might find in a "big three" workstation? Does this mean that this sample can be FM'd at full audio rate with, say, a wavetable oscillator?

P.S. Did you get the email I sent regarding the Waldorf Q's mod matrix?

Hi Pighood,

The sample RAM available won't be for long sample files - maybe more like 1 or 2 seconds for each osc, I'm not sure yet. But yes, you will be able to frequency modulate them, as they will be directly available to each DSP chip.

regards,
john b.

p.s. no, I did not get any email regarding the Q matrix

Here it is: (page 51)

http://www.waldorfmusic.de/assets/files ... al_eng.pdf

Will there be sustaining samples like strings & choirs?

Depends on sample memory. Solaris is not meant to be a "rompler" type instrument, though.

-john b.

I realize that...but it's always been a fascinating concept to me to FM "traditional" instrument samples with synth waveforms, wavetables etc. Such huge potential for wrong sounds.

Please consider even a truncated list of short samples, like the Korg MS2000 had...DWGS style from the DW-8000.

John Bowen wrote:Depends on sample memory. Solaris is not meant to be a "rompler" type instrument, though.

That sounds familiar – I'm sure you're still frustrated about the piano/drums/accordion upgrade ROM for the Wavestation. This is not as mass-market, though. But you might want to throw in a piano sound just to be safe!

I'm also interested in the idea of using e.g. a choir sample with heavy processing (FM, reversed up three octaves, etc.) for pad sounds. It doesn't have to be a large sample, I'm going to melt it anyway.

I personally would wish/hope for at least 16mb of sample memory, just enough for some nice digital voices, sampled strings to mutilate, ect... No need for massive piano multisamples or anything of course...

Will the sample memory use standard RAM? Couldn't it be expandable so those users who do want larger amounts of sample memory can have it?

synthetic wrote:

John Bowen wrote: I'm also interested in the idea of using e.g. a choir sample with heavy processing (FM, reversed up three octaves, etc.) for pad sounds. It doesn't have to be a large sample, I'm going to melt it anyway.

What he said.

I think expandable sample ram is a great idea i would pay for it!! having high quality realistic choir and string sounds would just increase it's already powerful sound potential.

Plus....can you imagine a sustained choir sound stuck in a rotor with a wavetable, a sawtooth and summut else?

A lot of the sounds in the Spectrasonics Atmosphere plug-in, mentioned in another thread, layer sound design with traditional strings, voices or analog pad. We know that it will do the latter, but some basic sample playback would really add to it.

How much RAM did the Wavestation EX have? 4MB? It wouldn't have to be much more than that, say 8MB of 48k samples. Not the 32k and lower sampling rates in most ROMplers. Quality, not quantity.

8 Megs of ram is a good starting point the sounds would not be compressed you don't have to worry about enough space for drum's and other conventional sounds,plus the ram could be expandable adds a lot of layering possibilities.

i too would love to be able to load samples , as mentioned strings, choirs, groans, moans and fx.

no need for any drums or anything rompler-like.

Those of you familiar with the plug-in know that sample playback was not a major feature of this synth! It is also not a main focus of the hardware, as there are plenty of other products on the market that can handle all the details of sample mapping and key range, velocity switching, etc. On-board RAM is going to be used for a number of things, not just sample storage.
We can consider some way to have expandable RAM, I suppose, but I'm really afraid this sidetracks the project into a whole other beast. Once you start down the path of trying to be a sampler, you have all sorts of issues, such as sample editing, looping and processing, etc., etc., etc., all of which will definitely add delays to finishing it up for a timely release.

That is not to say, however, that future versions of the OS could not contain such functions; just that, for now, we have to focus on getting the main body of functions working correctly.

regards,
john b.