I am still at the "Oscillator" section of Jim Aikin's great Power Tools for Synthesizer Programming book and in it the osc sync function is described very well. I have never programmed an osc synch patch before and so thought I'd have a go for this blog, tweaking until I found something nice.
This patch uses two sine waves, the first of which is used only to sync oscillator two as the level of oscillator one is set to 0%. I have detuned oscillator two by a couple of octaves and the output is a rather pleasant buzzing sound not dissimilar to a saw wave. I added unison to fatten the sound a little and then added a couple of low pass filters in parallel. So far, so good.
Then I noticed a rather odd thing when I was previewing the patch. If I held a note and then struck another note twice in quick succession the sound lost its higher frequencies. The speed at which I struck the second and third notes was crucial to whether or not the higher frequencies were filtered out or not. Is this a bug in the software or a feature of VA synths when using osc sync? Perhaps one of you clever bunch can elighten me?
And here is a link to an example of the "bug" in action! (aiff format sound file)
Cheers to Steve from the yahoo groups who suggested that what was occuring was the unison turning off. Sure enough this appears to be the case, although the mp3 example was not the finished patch, but a 4 note unison version, which may have caused some confusion!
ReplyDeleteThanks folks!