A dedicated 3 engine slave for the Voyager?

[Cenydd Ros]

What about a rack module with 3 Voyager engines inside, no exterior controls (knobs or switches) except a couple of up down buttons and a screen? This to reduce production costs.

The purpose - to serve as three voices for a poly-chained Voyager, making the Voyager a four voice polyphonic synth. This is essentially chaining four Voyagers together, but the construction of a 3-in-one rack unit with bare minimum control surfaces could reduce the cost from $7500 to something realistic. A dedicated slave costing in the $2000 range that could turn my Voyager into a four voice polyphonic is something I would definitely buy.

[latigid on]

Hate to rain on your parade but this is a decade-old question that probably won't be solved any time soon.

1) PCB size. The Voyager main board is huge and thru-hole. Encasing multiple copies of that would run up the size and cost very quickly. A redesigned SMT board is much more likely (and the direction that they follow with the Sub line).

2) Poly chaining. The software interface and MIDI implementation make polyphonic systems possible but clunky to use (from others' experiences). A dedicated comm protocol would be better, see for instance DSI's Prophet poly chain.

3) Age of hardware. The Voyager has already been around for 10 years and micro tech has probably well surpassed what's inside by now. If Moog decided to go for this route then I bet it would be with a newly designed system.

[namahshaman]

I had a similar idea, except with the Sub37 instead of the Voyager (which may be more feasible). Making slim (slimmer that the Slim Phatty) knob-less rack units to be used for extra voices would be a beautiful addition to the Sub. They could even call it something cute like the SubZero or SubVoice. Hopefully, the simplistic design could bring them below $500. Then, for the price of a new Voyager, you could have a Sub37 poly. Yes, please.

[EricK]

It seems as if it is a better idea to design a polyphonic engine from the outset rather than trying to force multiple monophonic voices to conform to polyphonic playing. Oberheim did it though.

The key is the interface between the keyboard and the engines. I don't know anything about this aspect of product design, but there doesn't need to be much of a disconnect between each key and each voice. This seems to be the problem with chaining multiple voyagers together.

When one plays a chord, let's say the thumb is the root note and the index finger is the third, and the ring finger is the fifth. They way the polychain works is that the voices can get mixed up depending on which note hits first or last.

Let's now say you are doing complicated bass staccato with your left hand and Midi CC 1 (voice 1) is controlling a bass voice or synth, and Midi CC 2 is controlling a lead synth for the upper register accompaniment. Unless you have a split keyboard controller, whatever note is played first is Midi CC 1. So if you are playing fast staccato lines, and your right hand happens to play the note first, that's going to be the bass note.

What makes a piano a piano is that each note is its own voice with direct access to each string allowing for at-will articulation of each note.

Because I never had success with the Voyager and Taurus as a polychain, I haven't tried this in years, so the above paragraph might be subject to review by someone like CZ who has multiple Voyager RMEs.

[vasago]

Or you could just buy three rme's used. It'll take some time but you can get them cheaply.


It's what I did.