Hello!
I love the idea of the PolyPulse and I have read through the manual but I have some questions.
1.) I am interested in using the Poly Pulse for generative ambient. Most of the demos (except for one FM ambient one) focus more on the best groove box side. The synth sounds demonstrated sound cool (especially the 4 section morph) however don’t really show off how good or deep the synthesis can get. Looking through the manual, other than additive, it seems all the synth engines are “simplified” compared to a regular synth. 4 op fm vs 6, subtractive is simple, and it seems you can’t have a filter on a sample? I want to sample my synths and mangle the sounds like an octatrack, v-synth, or Kurzweil Vast through filters and effects, played polyphonically from keyboard as pads. Is this possible? I could see that maybe through the effects a lot of sound design can happen. There is no list of modulation destinations. I take it things like filter FM (modulate filter by oscillator) and audio rate modulation are not possible in the subtractive or additive engines? A list of modulation destinations would be fantastic.
Can you list notes with very specific hertz in the note list. Like if I wanted 111hz and 777 hertz is that possible? That would be worth it alone. No hardware synth does that yet that I am aware.
Any demos showing off the power of the synths for ambient sound design vs as melodic bits for groove box duty would be appreciated. I want to know if I could use this for deep sound design instead of something like V.A.S.T. in the K2700 etc.
It’s super impressive and cool unit so if it is not geared toward what I am wanting, that doesn’t take away at a what an innovative interesting unit this is! Congratulations!
No one? Since I asked I have read more to know that samples can’t be filtered in the engines. However I would still love to hear some more synth engine demos and get a list of mod destinations! Still wanting to know more as a purchase is tempting!
Sorry I was not able to get back to you before the weekend.
So you can filter samples by adding a filter audio effect after the sound engine. If you put the filter before the panner (usually that would be stereo) the filter processes the individual voices and thus you can also apply filter envelopes that trigger separately for each voice/note (as one would expect if the filter was part of the voice).
Almost all sound engine, audio effects and modulator parameters can be modulated. Usually if a parameter is mapped to an encoder it can be modulated, but if it is mapped to a button it cannot.
You can get cool sounds with fast modulation of the filter. However: a sound engines’ oscillators cannot be used as a modulation source and the LFO ranges from 0.001Hz to 100 Hz in unsynced mode.
There is currently no way to input specific frequencies in Hz, but you can create custom scala tuning files and load those in the PolyPulse to experiment with.
In the upcoming update MIDI can also be used to play microtuned scales on external synths (if set to polyphony = 1 or if set to MPE) using automatic pitch bending.
I agree with you that the demo’s are mostly showing the groovebox side. I haven’t gotten around to shooting new video’s, but I will keep this in mind for future video’s!
This is fantastic because the microtonal patches on popular hardware and software synths are limited to 128 different notes. For 19-EDO, that’s almost seven octaves, which is fine, but for 31-EDO that only covers four octaves. Worse for higher EDOs. Pitchbend microtuning is full-range, though at the expense limiting polyphony to one note per channel, making software synths the best way to go here to get up to 16-polyphony.
In my software sequencer, along with pitchbend microtuning I also implemented MTS’s SINGLE NOTE TUNING CHANGE (REAL-TIME), which enables polyphonic microtuning. Only a few synths support the full MTS standard, but @ward do you have any thoughts about supporting MTS?
MTS’s SINGLE NOTE TUNING CHANGE (REAL-TIME) retunes any MIDI notes to any frequency. That means that, on any single channel, you can play any number of microtuned notes simultaneously because you’re not using channel pitch bend. In other words, polyphonic microtonality per channel. Unlimited microtonal polyphony.
Another question, can a midi keyboard be setup to play the more than one track multitimbraly? Let’s say I wanted Granular on one track and Subtractive on another and I wanted to play them together as two layers, obviously might only get 4 or 5 voices but is this possible. I’m fascinated by the machine on one level but don’t know how deep the sound design synth side can go. I notice of the effects, none are modulation like phaser, chorus, etc.
Yes this is possible. On each track you can set to which MIDI channel it listens and optionally limit the range of MIDI keys (so you can create splits). If you listen to MIDI channel 2 on track 1 that does not prevent track 2 from also listening to MIDI channel 2.
Currently there are no dedicated modulation effects. You can however create modulation effects with a delay. Set sync to free, assign an LFO to the delay time and set the algo to digital, analog or bucket.