Published on Mar 13, 2006 Genius Anz’s movie vault / Retro and Latest tech!
"Connection is
Korg MS-10(1VCO synth) VCO out (customized) --- Polybox --- MS-10 VCF in
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If you send one VCO signal to the EML Polybox, it will become a chord and come out. In the movie, I connect Korg 's MS - 10 VCO out to Polybox, return Polybox out to MS - 10' s VCF in, and play it.
For example, when holding a chord of "C, E, G" with Polybox and playing a note of "C" with MS - 10, "C, E, G" sounds, and MS - 10 plays "D" Then you can get chords of "D, F #, A" and so on.
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Long ago, when I was trying hard with a synth with only one VCO, if I could buy such equipment, I would have done a mad cynicalism and copied ELP."
Finally get to see one of these in action. The Poly-Box allows you to play your monosynth polyphonically almost like a real time sampler. It's not clear to me if you can actually play multiple keys at the same time for true polyphony. The video does not show this. If you know please comment. "Poly-Box is a pitch following variable chord generator controlled by your synthesizer and Poly-Box's own keyboard with built-in memory. Poly-Box takes a single pitch from your synthesizer and creates two banks of pitch sources. Each pitch bank contains 13 simultaneously available pitch sources at precise semitone intervals - covering an entire chromatic octave. The pitch banks may be in the same or different octaves, and can cover the range from one above to three octaves below the synthesizer oscillator."
More on the Poly-Vox on VSE.
Updates:
1. Make sure to check out the comments for more on the Poly-Box
2. David Rogoff sent the following link on the basic technology to AH: http://www.organservice.com/crm/topdividers.htm
3. RSF made a comparable box, the black box (via synth ollie also on AH).
Update via Mike DB on AH:
"Clearly he has the polybox output being "re-filtered".
It's an amazing tool, but descriptions of it are often misleading.
Here's my attempt to clarify what it can and can't do. (originally posted
to the EMLsynth yahoo group):
Basically it is designed to track the pitch of one single voice. Then it
has 12 of it's own voices tuned chromatically apart from each other which
can be played on the 12 keys and will sound and stay relative to the
tracked pitch. The original root pitch is always coming from the low "C"
key on the keyboard. For example, press the "E" key of the Polybox
keyboard and you would hear a voice that is a major 3rd above the tracked
"root" pitch. It will follow that source and stay a major third above
it. You can play "chords" or any combination on the 12 keys or all of
them. It does a couple of other tricks like you can move the whole output
up or down a full octave and there are some phasing effects.
It won't read more than one voice and if you try, it will only
respond with some chaotic squawks. Same goes for noise and other sounds
with no distinct single pitch----of course chaotic squawks have their value
too.
It does not translate envelope or filter from the original voice; the
source timbre and expression is not preserved. The new voices are basically
either on or off as you play the keys and they are pretty much of a
generic sawtooth tone which you can fool with a bit on the Poly's
controls. You could, of course, run the Poly's output thru other effects
and filters and such to further modify it, but that's as much as it does
on it's own."
