The Oberheim Xpander had some interesting patches created by “zeroing out” the pulse width - meaning the pulse narrowed to zero and the osc no longer produced any sound… You could do this from the leading or trailing edge.
Is this possible on the A4?
Main Xpander patch I remember was a very nice pad with the 2 osc’s tuned one octave apart, positive pulse width mod from a slow lfo on osc 1, and negative mod from the same lfo on osc 2. The result was a wonderful floating octave shift that filled a ton of space with just a 3 note chord.
You can do a similar patch by just cross-fading between two oscs, but using the pulse width to do it is a totally different sound.
Also, if you’re in poly mode from the new update, how is output panning handled? One again, back to some of the older analogue poly’s - “round robin” panning - 1st voice played went left, 2nd went right, 3rd left … so a 4 chord had a nice spacial quality to it across the stereo field. Most digital synths won’t do this (the older Yamaha TX803 module would do this), and I really miss it.
What are the panning modes in the A4? It should be the same with the keys, correct?
PWM works the way you describe, the extremes don’t produce any sound. I didn’t try making the sound you described, though, may have to try it later
Poly mode doesn’t seem to do any special panning - all the notes are panned to the same position. HOWEVER! While testing this, I noticed that setting an LFO speed to 0 and making it modulate pan made polyphony act the way you said. A very interesting effect, though I’m not sure how reliable this is (and if it’s intentional or not). And of course it can’t be used if you need both LFOs for other modulation duties.
edit: Another way to handle panning the way you describe:If you can devote the tracks just for the polyphony, you can make polyphony play the specific sound tied to each track, and then you can have the same sound in each track but panned differently. So doable, but not very user-friendly!
[quote=““Low Life””]
edit: Another way to do handle panning the way you describe:If you can devote the tracks just for the polyphony, you can make polyphony play the specific sound tied to each track, and then you can have the same sound in each track but panned differently. So doable, but not very user-friendly!
[/quote]
This is very cool, like the way you would do it on a four voice! Making a chord of all slightly different sounds with different modulations is super cool for evolving sounds.
[quote=““Low Life””]
PWM works the way you describe, the extremes don’t produce any sound. I didn’t try making the sound you described, though, may have to try it later
[/quote]
The other part of the patch - modulate the LFO rate just a bit with key tracking so they’re not all in sync with each other when playing a chord. You end up with swirly goodness.
This is very cool, like the way you would do it on a four voice! Making a chord of all slightly different sounds with different modulations is super cool for evolving sounds.[/quote]
+1
I was trying to find a way to pan each voice and that’s exactly what I did … not really user friendly I will create a feature request to have the panning option without using each track sounds. My TETR4 does it naturally and I really like it
I will create a feature request to have the panning option without using each track sounds. My TETR4 does it naturally and I really like it