John Bowen Synth Design

Hi,

Does the Solaris have any kind of unison spread or stereo widening for stacked oscillators at all? Haven't been able to find this info yet. I really like this feature in the Virus & Sylenth synths and can make for some really fat sounds.

Yes, this idea has been around in DSP based synths on Scope cards and now in hardware, but we have it in spades.
Seperate Oscillator glide per Oscillator and Unison DeTune sets to Poly or Mono for real wide sounds.
Then each Oscillator can use an LFO for Panning in Positive and Negative values/amounts.
This creates controllable motion.
I like having 2 x Oscillators, Panned Center in Unison DeTune setting of 2 voices. DeTune amount around 12%, then the other 2 x Oscillators can be panned across the 2 x main Oscillators back and forth with controllable rate and depth. Usually a Sine LFO smoothed down a little bit works for me.
Solaris is the God Of Motion in ancient Greek Mythology, and since we are all Gods, we can have it too.

Toby,
THe quick answer to your question is that, no, we don't not have a parameter in the Unison functions that does this.
Jimmy presents a way of achieving movement and so on in a stereo field, but it's not the 'spread' amount that the Virus TI has.

john b.

DSI polysynths also implement this (voice detuning + stereo spread in unison mode) in the analog world, which is a very nice feature.
Solaris should implement this along with analog drift (osc tune + start phase), without the need to burn additionnal modulation patches.

Agreed.

synthwalker wrote:DSI polysynths also implement this (voice detuning + stereo spread in unison mode) in the analog world, which is a very nice feature.
Solaris should implement this along with analog drift (osc tune + start phase), without the need to burn additionnal modulation patches.

Yes, please!

nice thanks for the replies

synthwalker wrote:DSI polysynths also implement this (voice detuning + stereo spread in unison mode) in the analog world, which is a very nice feature.
Solaris should implement this along with analog drift (osc tune + start phase), without the need to burn additionnal modulation patches.

Agreed by me.

Often I find myself liking the tamer, "not unisono" sounds more than the stacked ones, especially when I play chords and I really wondered why... it may be too full or precise on the Solaris, and I always wanted a stereo spread with some kind of "analog" drift parameter there as well. The internal chorus is no replacement for this, it add's more like a coloured blur to the pristine solaris sound.

I also would like to have a modulatable panorama parameter for each oscillator in the oscillator section. The more I understand the capabilities of this beast, the more I miss basic panorama modulations in the synth engine of the Solaris.

You can't pan oscillators because the whole audio signal pass is mono up to the VCAs output. This is where stereo begins.

I think Jaulus might be confusing individual oscillator panning with what is going on in the DSI synths, which is individual voice panning. The best way to implement this in the Solaris would be to use the random note generator (when we get it coded) to control the pan position. This would provide a different pan position for each voice as it is played.

To have each oscillator panned initially would normally require a stereo Mixer into a pair of filters and VCAs.

You could, however, try out individual panning for 3 Oscillators, to test if this is really what you'd want:

1) set up each VCA to have its filter as input, except VCA4 - set that to Mixer1
2) for each Filter 1-3, set a single oscillator as input (Filter1 with Osc1, Filter2 with Osc2, Filter3 with Osc3)
3) Set Mixer 1's inputs to be each of the 3 VCAs
4) Adjust the panning position of each of the 3 oscillators by using their VCA's pan parameter.
5) Using the Enable Part switches, you can check each position of each oscillator, and then hear them all together by just using Part 4.

Now, this example is for a fixed pan position for each of the 3 Oscs. If instead you want to have modulation going on for each (which I assume you do, since that's much more interesting), you wouldn't use VCA4/Part 4, but turn on Parts 1 through 3, set each VCA pan position to Center, and then modulate each one (via Source2 in the VCA Mod pages) with different LFOs or whatever.

Toby Emerson wrote:Does the Solaris have any kind of unison spread or stereo widening for stacked oscillators at all? Haven't been able to find this info yet. I really like this feature in the Virus & Sylenth synths and can make for some really fat sounds.

This is also stacked voices, not oscillators.

In unison, you are stacking voices...and in the Solaris, you can set the number of voices you want to be 'stacked' Since there are 10 voices available, if you were to set the voice number to 5, you could then play a 2 note chord, with each note playing 5 voices.
Or conversely, if you set it to 2, you could play a 5-note chord with each note having 2 voices stacked.

(And as an additional choice for Unison, you can select CHORD, which will grab all currently held voices and stack them at their current note value when you turn on the Unison switch while holding down the keys.)

But I do agree, a panoramic spread would be a nice function, and was on the list way back when....

JB

Thanks John! My thoughts about oscillator panning originate from the Akai S-Series Samplers, where you had basic waveform-samples to use the sampler as a synth. Every Sound-Programm consisted of up to 4 samples, and every sample-"oscillator" could be panned (or pan modulated) individually. It always made a very nice effect when you detuned the same samples a little and spread one to the left and one to the right.

Well, that is not something that depends on the unison function.....

So, what was the S-series filter structure? You'd need a stereo mixer feeding a pair of filters/VCAs running in parallel. I'm familiar with how this needs to be structured, as I had this arrangement in one of my Scope plug-ins (called 'Ambient').

A fixed hardware assignment like that can be pretty simple to build, but it becomes more expensive when you try to build it with a modular system.