MATRIXSYNTH: Vintage Knob Analysis and Recommendations - Prophet 6


Sunday, March 07, 2021

Vintage Knob Analysis and Recommendations - Prophet 6


video by Creative Spiral

Interesting point he makes about going too far. Technically, you don't have to turn the knob to max, so the choice is yours. I can see max settings being useful for things like random appegiations and sequences that bring life to a pattern. The KORG Mono/Poly and Oberheim TVS excel in this as you can have differently tuned osciallators and waveforms for each step. It opens things up. I can see wanting things kept in check for chords and the like, but you can always dial the knob back if that's what you want. So, personally, I'd rather have more than less...

"A technical overview of the Vintage Knob implementation in new Sequential Prophet 6, OB-6, and Prophet 5 Rev 4. I spent several hours analyzing the Oscillators, Envelope ADR timings, and Filter characteristics. This video explores the vintage knob behavior in depth, and also offers up some recommendations on how adjusting the values could greatly improve the usability of the Vintage Knob across a range of values.

I hope Sequential will consider these recommendations. I've been researching per voice variance over the past few years, and spent hundreds of hours working on voice modeling on various VCO, DCO and digital synths. My expectation is that it would probably be a trivial task to make these adjustments, and would result in improving the behavior and reducing weird dissonance and wonky sound on some patches."

4 comments:

  1. Fantastic video!

    So glad to see this.

    One step in a good direction from the present behavior would be to allow the various tables to be scaled. One version of that needs either menus or multiple knobs, but another version could use the single existing knob. That way you could scale back the filter or EGs -or any other class of offsets- individually in relation to the rest.

    Excellent video!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Matrix wrote:
    Technically, you don't have to turn the knob to max, so the choice is yours. I can see max settings being useful for things like random appegiations and sequences that bring life to a pattern.
    ...
    I can see wanting things kept in check for chords and the like, but you can always dial the knob back if that's what you want. So, personally, I'd rather have more than less...

    @Matrix
    His point might be better expressed by noting that the excess in filter is not 'matched' to the excess in oscs. This is why simply not turning up the Vintage knob as far doesn't solve the problem. When you turn it up the relationships are out of whack. If the relationships were fixed or adjusted inthe ways he suggests, then the useful range of the knob is improved. One could probably retain the values he sees as too high, as long as the better matched sets are available along the way fronm off to full.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Understood and i don't necessarily disagree. Just offering a different perspective as the effect wouldn't be the same in that case. The Jupiter-X and Xm "Age" parameter is even more extreme. It literally sounds broken at max settings. I have an original Novation BassStation with an extremely distorted pulse wave on one of the oscillators but I wouldn't fix it as I actually like the way it sounds. I'd rather get another one before fixing it. I remember seeing an interview with a popular electronic musician who said he was afraid of fixing a synth for the same reason. He knew he would lose that particular sound forever. I like the first Anonymous commenter's idea of being able to adjust one parameter at a time as well as a master knob. That would be pretty interesting. Adjust the whole thing in a more consistent way as you suggest, and then individually muck up the oscillators, filters, envelopes, etc... But that's more time and work that could go towards designing other synths.

      Delete
  3. Brian Eno is the one most often referred to in that quote context. But it's something others have expressed too.

    FWIW, I'm all three anons here.

    I think the power of this technique -applying offsets- goes far beyond a polysynth emulation of something older. It's a keys to the kingdom kind of technique which has useful application in all kinds of synths, from semi-modulars like a 2600, to full modulars. From mono to poly.

    ReplyDelete

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