Synth Polyphony Broken Down

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jan01/articles/synthsec.asp

Carbon111 sent this to me. It's a great article from Sound on Sound that covers how digital technology was used to overcome the high expense of analog polysynths. It covers the Crumar Trilogy's cut-down paraphonic approach which I refered to in this post. The SOS article is a long and semi-technical read, but well worth it if you've ever wondered about how the different approaches to polyphony works on an analog synth. In pure laymen's terms you can essentially have a bunch of mono synths hooked up in a box to make a polyphonic synth or you can cust costs and increase stablity by having polyphony shared accross boards, this is the paraphonic approach. You start with one board for one note, say C, that covers all octaves of C. When you play more than one C, that same board is triggered. The obvious problem is the Envelope stage as well as other components are shared. So if you want a short attack while sustaining a C on a lower octave, it won't quite work as they are not independent. But you could have some interesting triggering effects which Gordon Reid notes in the article regarding the Crumar Trilogy. Note that most poly analog synths have separate components for each voice, so you esentially have x number of mono synths digitally controlled to keep them sounding similar. The great polysynths including the Prophet 5, Jupiter 8, Memorymoog and Andromeda A6 for example did this.