Thanks for the encouragement, kidharpoon.
Sorry someone decided to smite you. And... prepare for a typical lengthy Synthguy essay...
For much of my synth life, I'd buy an instrument and spend many weeks ripping out preset patches and making my own, to really get to know it and see what I could get out of it. And just sitting down with a machine and seeing what it's capable of is a lot of fun. It helped that I didn't care for many of the patches the programmers made for it.
But things changed over the past decade. For one thing, synth makers spent the money to hire great programming teams, like KORG and Kurzweil, or hired out some big names in electronic music like Rick Wakeman or Herbie Hancock. Thus, the patches became much cooler, and harder to discard and ignore. Plus, I got to where I began programming mostly for the pieces I was composing. A part needed a unique sound I didn't have on hand, so I'd play around with them and create some. So I've kind of fallen out of the habit of programming for the sheer fun of it. I'm hoping this little project helps me rediscover my "groove."
I've tended to approach my programming in stages. In other words, rather than make a huge instrument which is more or less like the original as a whole, I'v e been doing patches which are a bit more restricted to those most useful to the type of sounds being programmed for.
So for instance with the Odyssey, I include all the useful modules: the LFO, the S/H module, the oscillators, the dual filters, the envelope generators - though I use two full ADSRs in my patches. I leave off the ring modulator and perhaps something else. I'm making another "instrument" with the ring modulator to experiment with ring mod atonal sounds, because wiring it in and not using it has proven a bit too complicated. So specialized patches just for it is not just easier, but probably easier to work with.
In the case of "modularized" keyboards such as the ARP Chroma and Oberheim Matrix-12, where the patching is done through a wild maze of computer controlled junctions, it's proving a bit more complicated than I expected. Rather than being like the Odyssey or Jupiter 8, where the controllers like LFOs and envelopes can be routed all over the place, you can change the entire voice architecture in the machine, just like a modular synth. This is both very cool and daunting at the same time, because I'm not quite sure what to make out of all these parts!
I decided to start from scratch rather than pick a patch that sounds cool and close to what I was after. After all, I gave you guys some small heck over your reluctance to dive in and play with this box. And I found out that it's a lot more work than I remembered! But still, it's not hard when you get going for a bit.
A few tips: I approach things based on the sounds I'm making. Suppose I want to make a violin patch, which I did. Acoustic instruments like violins are played differently than the electronic stuff. A violinist will pull away from the root note for vibrato, and usually no more than a semitone. Plus, the vibrato made with their fingers is like a sinewave, while a triangle might sound a little better for electronic sounds. So when I set up an LFO to provide sine vibrato with key pressure, I also add in some of that pressure control to pull the pitch of the oscillators down with it, so that the peak of the sinewave puts the sound at the original pitch, perhaps just a bit over, and at the bottom of the sweep, it's no more than a semitone down. Slight vibrato works better than strong vibrato for acoustic sounds. You can also play with adding a bit of negative vibrato to the lowpass filter, as well as the output.
Guitar is the opposite, as guitarists push and stretch the strings with their fingers, causing the pitch to go up, except in the case of a "whammy bar," which I believe can go up or down in pitch.
Winds like flutes, oboes and saxes, as well as brass, are different yet. While there is some vibrato caused by their expressive playing, most of the tonal change comes from dulling the sound a bit in a tremolo. So what you actually want to do is add some negative sinewave to the lowpass filter, and a very slight amount to the oscillators. Again, perhaps a bit to the outputs as well. I tend to "play" my vibratos manually with the joystick or pitch wheel though, because that's how the actual player does it, and it sounds a bit more authentic.
Most all of these patches though are purely synthetic, with just a passing similarity to something "real," like synstrings and brass. Hopefully they will sound remotely inviting to encourage you guys to pop open the hood and see how they're made. And I'm going to make a BIG post about the details of these patches, going into the controllers I set up and how the patch responds to them. How I play them and thus why I built them the way I did. So you won't just get a bunch of patches, but a little programming lesson along with them. Cool, huh?
And I'll say more about that "design philosophy" post in a day or so, how I would go about building a modular synth in the Origin.
Well, back at it I go.
