Chord-Machines on DN?

[acidk]

Elektronauts!

Bought my M:C this summer and thought of upgrading to a DN (filters, better buttons, audio inputs etc.).

I was wondering, if there is an equivalent on DN to M:C chord machines, a feature I really like a lot…

(Seems to be a feature on the MonoMachine as well).

Cheers

flo

[Redukt]

There are no separate “machines” on the Digitone, synthesis is the same on all four tracks. As it’s an 8-voice polyphonic synth though, you can play (and p-lock, of course) any chord you like with any sound you come up with.

[finalform]

Yeah, the chord machine on M:C is not FM-based, it’s a wavetable synth in a similar fashion to the MnM’s Digipro Ensemble machine, and uses a wavetable of additive synthesis waveforms that @Ess created. Not directly reproducible on DN, but as @Redukt points out, you have polyphony on your side with DN.

[avantronica]

@finalform

uses a wavetable of additive synthesis waveforms

my impression was that it was just the four individual operators sounding (tweaked/processed) - that’s why they’re mostly fundamental tones for the chord voicings - there’d be no reason to limit a wavetable to sin like variants

[craig]

There’s a chord generator, i.e. play one note and it’ll generate a three-note chord in a scale of your choosing, or in chromatic mode you can choose a chord type, like minor, major, etc. It’s actually more flexible than M:C

[finalform]

Explained here by Ess:

@Ess

the Chord for example has a very different world of sound, it’s inherently much softer due to the wavetables being made with additive synthesis - using that for stuff like Kicks, Hihats, percussion … It’s a lot of fun.

[avantronica]

I get you - but I kinda read this as operators processed by the shaping within the engine to achieve wavetable like timbres as opposed to expressly referencing different wavetables - I may be wrong, nothing in the open text to back up my theory, it’s a hunch and I’m admittedly late to the DN party too - but whilst the info there sorta states what you said, I’m still of the opinion that the four single operators are deployed and reshaped - so it’s more an additive synthesis I’m proposing than a wavetable one

you could well be and are most likely right and you’re taking a more credible assumption of the text than I - but I’m thinking about how it has sounded based on my (not sure where from) assumptions - okay, now I’m confused, because I’m internally mixing up DN aspects with MC aspects (bought both at a similar time), the DN does have an additive dimension that the user has control over and I’ve no knowledge of that in the MC

for some reason I’m sure the chord machines are formed upon the operators and modulated, but I’m clearly wrong especially given the explanation from the source that you recalled ( I had read it but it didn’t stick, interesting, I’ll need to listen through them with a fresh ear - I always found them to be very fundamental sounding)

what day is it anyway I’m even more confused - I did have pretty bad insomnia last night so … my bad I thinks

[finalform]

I’ll try and find it but IIRC there was another post where Ess mentioned he’d made the additive waveforms for the wavetable in Max for Live or something similar. And/or he explicitly stated that it was a wavetable and not FM.

[finalform]

@avantronica maybe we’re both right?

Model:Cycles

No the Chord machine uses all of the 4 operators to form a chord which you can sort of scan through smoothly with inversions and octaves. It’s actually a wavetable oscillator and has morphing between waves just like the harmonics on the Digitone

[avantronica]

some hybrid hoodoo/voodoo going on right there, who knows, it sorta sounds/reads more wavetable than I thought

[finalform]

@Ess

At first it was sort of a mix between additive synthesis and chord intervals, but we later as a team made it much more musical by introducing the idea of using chord inversions for the interval mixing.

The voice itself is simple - it’s just four oscillators that each play the same wavetable. I made the waveforms with a max patch which later turned into Hard/Softcore. All of the tables in the Cycles are made strictly with additive synthesis. Sorting them in the particular order took a long time, it was really hard to find an order that felt logical and nice to sweep through, hehe.

I would like to add graphs of all the waveforms in the manual, but I haven’t had the time to plot them out yet.

That’s the post I was thinking of.

[Ess]

Well, most FM synths are in some ways close to wavetable synths - essentially they’re both employing the same technology for a basic oscillator; a phasor scanning through a lookup table of data* (generating a waveform) … Most FM synths of course only use a sinewave lookup, but for example the Digitone and Cycles has a few more options. For example the harmonics on the Digitone, or the Chord engine on the Cycles - that’s simply different waveforms being used, and the engine is interpolating (crossfading 1-dimensionally) between the different waveforms.

Of course modern wavetable synths go further by introducing phase distortion and multi-dimensional mixing to skew the lookup tables in different exciting ways, but the basic principle of the oscillators are the same.

(*the lookup phase is then modulated… Making FM! Er, well PM! But you know, nomenclature, history etc…)

[Kja]

I wish I could understand this better… so how does it make sound from data? Because it’s reading data so fast that it makes a sound? I’m lost when it comes to digital…

[what_lives]

To my ears the different waveforms are rather different in terms of loudness, so i’ve found it hard to make the sweeps smooth and consistent in volume and timbre… Any advice is appreciated.

Regarding chords - and 'm not trying to be flippant, but - the digitone as a whole is a massive chord machine…