Project 3-1: Organize Your RAM. Go through all of the sounds in your synth’s RAM patch memory, listening to them and making notes about which ones you want to use, perhaps for specific musical projects, and which you can live without. If the RAM sounds are a jumble, you may want to organize them into groups, so that related sounds — basses, for instance — are together.
Moving sound programs around in memory requires at least one unused (temporary) memory location:
To swap two sounds, you need to write the first sound into the temporary slot, then write the second sound into the slot where the first sound started, and then grab the first sound from its temporary location and write it to the slot where the second sound started.
To ensure that you never inadvertently overwrite a sound that you need, create a silent sound, and name it Nothing. Save this to each memory location where there’s a sound you’re sure you’re never going to use. Next time you create a new sound that you want to keep, you can safely save it to any memory location that currently contains Nothing.
If you have access to an editor/librarian, however, you should save the synth’s RAM contents to your computer before starting this process. (Editor/librarians are discussed in Chapter One.) Doing so offers an added level of protection, and also ensures that if your tastes or musical needs change, you’ll be able to restore those sounds you thought you’d never use.
Project 3-2: Big Multi. To explore your instrument’s multitimbral mode, try these experiments:
• Assign the same sound to four parts, and detune the parts from one another using their coarse or fine-tune parameters. Try fine-tuning part 1 about 6 cents sharp, part 2 about 2 cents sharp, part 3 about 2 cents flat, and part 4 about 6 cents flat. With sustained sounds, this detuning will give the sound a rich chorused quality. By panning the opposite-tuned parts hard left and hard right, you’ll add space to the chorusing. With coarse (half-step) detuning, try programming the four parts so that you can play various chords with one finger — a dominant 7th or 9th, stacked fourths, and so on.
• Edit the one-finger-chord multi so that each note in the chord is played by a different but closely related sound. Try using four brass-type presets, or four plucked presets. If necessary, adjust the loudness of the various parts so that the chord is voiced in a balanced way. If your instrument has a start delay parameter for individual parts within a multi, program the multi so that the voices play an arpeggio rather than a block chord.
• Stack (layer) two different sounds on one channel or zone. Assign a chord-type preset to one part and a monophonic lead preset to the other part. Set the lead preset to high-note priority, so that it will always play the top note in a chord.
Chapter 4
Oscillators
All synthesizers have a way (or perhaps two or three different ways) to generate sounds. The devices that generate the sounds are called oscillators. The sounds coming from the synth’s oscillators are the building blocks out of which all of your finished synth programs will be made. You’ll seldom listen to the raw sound of an oscillator by itself. Usually its sound will be massaged and sculpted by the other components of the instrument — filters, effects, and so on — before being sent to the instrument’s audio output. But without the oscillators, these other components would have nothing to chew on.
Actually, that’s not strictly true. Many synthesizers have external audio inputs. After patching an audio signal (from a microphone or a previously recorded audio track, for example) to the synth’s audio input, if the synth has one, you’ll be able to shape the external signal in most of the same ways you could if it were coming from an oscillator. Synths with external audio inputs open up a lot of musical possibilities, but in essence they’re functioning as effects processors on steroids, not as synthesizers. The details of external audio processing are beyond the scope of this book, but you’ll find a bit more information in Chapter Nine.
The two types of oscillators you’ll see most often are analog-style (in which category I’ll include both real analog and digital simulations thereof) and sample playback. There’s also an in-between category.
And a few synths sport additive oscillators and other clever designs. In this chapter we’ll take a close look at all of them. We’ll also cover an assortment of features you’ll often see associated with oscillators, including oscillator sync and intermodulation.
The sound of one oscillator by itself tends to be a little naked — one-oscillator patches are the tool of choice for pointed, in-your-face sounds such as bass, but not for rich, swirling colors — so most synths offer at least two. Designs with three or four oscillators are common. One of the most important ways to create new sounds is to blend the sounds coming from several oscillators into unique combinations.
Figure 4-1. The basic analog waveforms (top to bottom): sine, triangle, sawtooth, square, and pulse.