[FR] Unison voice number as mod source

Polyphonic Analog Synthesizer
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andy-cytomic
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Joined: Wed Mar 10, 2021 12:08 am

[FR] Unison voice number as mod source

Post by andy-cytomic » Wed Mar 10, 2021 2:47 am

[Feature Request] Unison voice number as mod source

I'm loving my Moog One, but there is one thing I'm really missing, and that is the ability to use the modulation system to vary parameters of unison voices.

The idea, which I implemented in Strobe / Cypher / Amber while working at FXpansion, is to have a few mod sources which are based on the unison voice number, and the voice number, which you can map to anything you want via the mod system. Pretty basic but very powerful.

For example, for unison voice number, you could have a few sources similar to these:

Unison A unipolar:
1 unison voice: 0
2 unison voices: 0, 100
3 unison voices: 0, 100, 50
4 unison voices: 0, 100, 33, 66
...
Unison B unipolar:
1 unison voice: 0
2 unison voices: 100, 0
3 unison voices: 50, 0, 100
4 unison voices: 66, 33, 100, 0
...
Unison A bipolar:
1 unison voice: 0
2 unison voices: -100, 100
3 unison voices: -100, 100, 0
4 unison voices: -100, 100, -33, 33
...
Unison B bipolar:
1 unison voice: 0
2 unison voices: 100, -100
3 unison voices: 0, -100, 100
4 unison voices: 33, -33, 100, -100
...

In this way you can map this mod source to things like tuning, pan, pulse width, filter cutoff, lfo speeds etc, and be able to adjust the number of unison voices afterwards and still get a great result.

As a bit more detail, if you have a Unison A unipolar source with two unison voices you would have the number 0 and 100 to use via the mod system, so you can view the second unison voice as being able to easily layer a variation of the base preset, without having to chew up another layer of the synth, or have to jump between / keep track of which layer(s) you're editing, you use the mod system instead. The reason this is powerful is that you can adjust the base preset and the unison voice has all those changes automatically, you can't "un-sync" the voices when editing like you can accidentally do with multiple layers, and you can dynamically adjust the number of layers via the Unison voice count control.

In practice you actually need more than one unison voice source, for example when mapping to pitch and pan you may not want the lowest pitch on the left up to highest pitch on the right.

Another useful source is having the voice number as a normalised mod source.

It's also handy to have some additional random number sources, but I'll leave the focus of this post on unison voice number and voice number as mod sources since I think these offer the biggest wins for the least effort.

What do people think? Hopefully this makes sense, but if not please ask some questions :)

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