John Bowen Synth Design

Should it be the same Howard S. that I know from NI Reaktor and Virus programming guide ?
Anyway. I trust in the experience, also if not Mr Zebra

HS, you create some of the best presets I've ever heard(next to John Bowen of course ). When I went through the presets of my Indigo I kept discovering fantastic unique creative patches w/HS next to them. I thought to myself who is this HS? I googled it and then I realized who it was.
Thank you kind sir for sharing your creative talent.
Although the fun and creative part of having a Solaris will be "rolling our own" it will be interesting to see what people like HS come up with.

Just wanted to mention - I'll be posting all the files from the discussion here also in the Music/examples area of the Forum, just so there's a quick central location for those interested in finding the files without having to read through all the posts

-john b.

Hello Forum readers!

Last week saw my first Solaris OS update since Messe, adding hard sync functionality. Klaus has worked really hard with the intent to make the hard sync work as well as possible, without the aliasing problems evident in many other software versions out there (including his older Scope models). You can hear the results in the following comparisons.

From the first time I heard an oscillator hard sync'ed and pitch swept with an envelope (at an in-store ARP Odyssey demo that Roger Powell did in the mid 70's), I fell in love with the sound! It was one of the reasons I strongly insisted the Prophet 5 have hard sync capability, and the PolyMod function of envelope to pitch, and it was one of my favorite patches when I created the factory presets for it. So, it's only natural that I drag out my Prophet 5 (rev 3 in this case) and do a 'real-time' comparison.

I also thought it would be good to borrow a new Prophet '08, since there's so few Prophet 5s out there for the current user to try.

All 3 did a great job, as you 'll hear. I made a close approximation of the Prophet 5 preset 3-2, but with the filter fully open, to hear how they compared. The files are all .wav files; MP3 versions just ended up sounding pretty crappy!

I'm not going to say which is which here - guesses and comments are welcome!

1) http://www.johnbowen.com/WavDemos/Sync1.wav
2) http://www.johnbowen.com/WavDemos/Sync2.wav
3) http://www.johnbowen.com/WavDemos/Sync3.wav

There is a problem with one of the examples, which I will discuss after people have had a chance to listen.

Next I will patch together files that have each of the same note from each example, so you can hear the comparisons more specifically.

Cheers,
John B.

Can't resist...

1) = P5
2) = P08
3) = Solaris (obvious sync problem)

So... did I fall for the trick?

One of the problems in sample #3 is what I think is a bit of clipping, which I did not see in the recording - but that's in addition to the other, actual problem. I'll try to re-record and post it without any clipping edges.

Howard - too soon to comment from me. Let's get some more responses.....

john

Here's a re-recording of the second half of example 3:
http://www.johnbowen.com/WavDemos/Sync3fix.wav

Still has some pops, so not clipping in the recording process....

John Bowen wrote:Still has some pops, so not clipping in the recording process....

Still has a "cancellation" effect (which is what I think most people would notice first)

Howard wrote:Still has a "cancellation" effect (which is what I think most people would notice first)

Yes, and that's the 'problem' I found...more on that as I get more responses here...it just can't be me & you chatting

jb

Ummm my guess is the same as Howard.
The first one is so rich and beefy it has to be the Prophet 5!

Well...it's been a few days, and only these two comments...and I found out what was the problem with example #3. What I'm going to do is make another set of recordings, so as to be more fair to the #3 item - which was the Prophet '08. Here's the order:

1) Prophet 5
2) Solaris
3) Prophet '08

For this particular preset, the oscillator waveshape is set to a Pulse wave, at about a 51% duty cycle. For some reason (and I'd like to hear from any Prophet '08 owners to check), using this waveshape at this setting, with a pitch envelope range of 2 octaves+ a whole tone causes the Prophet '08 oscillator to 'go away' for a moment. I checked to make sure it wasn't some form of accidental pulse width modulation, because it was responding to the pulse width as I varied it (less dying out if the width was closer to the low end), but it definitely was a bug in the pitch control, and only over about a 1 octave of the upper keyboard there. Most likely it is something that this particular unit I borrowed has some hardware problem, but I would be curious to know if any other P'08 owners have found this.

In any case - if I use a sawtooth waveshape for the test, the the P'08 will work fine through the range...so let me re-do things, and get back to this again.

Thanks for listening,
john b.

John thanks for revealing the answers, it's strange the Prophet 08 is behaving this way. I'm looking forward to the sawtooth examples.

Thanks for the update .

very nice...the first two sounded very good, i am a p5 sounds fan, so this is good news

Hi,

I didn't post what I thought the synths were, although I did listen to them. I thought they were:

1. Prophet 5
2. Prophet 08
3. Solaris

so I got the Prophet 5 correctly. This one is very beefy and I was surprised to hear the second one was the Solaris. Which leads me to think that with some extra detuning, maybe they can sound exactly the same.

Can't wait to hear some more sonic examples.

OK - one more time, but for these I used a sawtooth waveshape for the sync'ed oscillator.

Let's also add another synth into the mix - there is now a Microwave XT in the group, so we have Solaris, Prophet 5, Prophet 08, and the XT to hear...but not necessarily in that order

If you want to guess first, please just don't look at the file link displayed in the bottom part of your browser when you mouse over the link (also when you open the file to listen). Then you can check the file names for the sources once you're done guessing to check your results...and please post your guesses!

1) SawSync #1
2) SawSync #2
3) SawSync #3
4) SawSync #4