Combinator unison/round robin

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AnotherMathias
Posts: 213
Joined: 29 Sep 2020

20 May 2021

With the new Combinator announced for September, I suspect that the feature set is pretty much settled, but there might still be time to make some additions.

This could be very useful and fun: a unison/round robin function. Let me explain:

For any instrument device in the Combinator, you would have the option to stack several identical copies. For example, add a Subtractor, now flip a with to make it a stack of five. Then, when assigning a knob (say, fine tune) to the Combinator UI, turning that knob will not adjust that knob to the same value on each subtractor copy like normal, instead you adjust the SPREAD of the fine tuning for each copy. Classic unison! And since you can do this with as many different parameters as you like, things can get pretty lively and interesting. A spread of different portamento times is very cool. Different envelope times is great, especially for resonant filter sweeps or oscillator sync.

That's the unison function, but what about the round robin? If this is selected, each time you play a new note, it will cycle through the 5 different copies of Subtractor, like cycling through the voices on an Oberheim analog. Again, the assignable knob will control the spread of the parameter between each Subtractor. You can go subtle (slightly different VCF cutoffs) or extreme. Playing polyphonically will be very organic.

The extra unison copies of the device will be invisible, and routed as if was just one regular device. All you need is a three way switch (off/unison/rr) and the number of voices (2-8, perhaps) for each instrument device in the Combinator.

Carpainter
Posts: 96
Joined: 28 Sep 2019

25 May 2021

I like your idea for an auto-unison knob, and I would add that it's important that we have enough knobs to assign to every parameter of whatever devices we're controlling. Being able to adjust the envelope, filters, etc. of 20 or 30 instruments simultaneously would open the door for ridiculous synth stacks that aren't feasible with the current 4-knob limit.

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aeox
Competition Winner
Posts: 3222
Joined: 23 Feb 2017
Location: Oregon

25 May 2021

Carpainter wrote:
25 May 2021
I like your idea for an auto-unison knob, and I would add that it's important that we have enough knobs to assign to every parameter of whatever devices we're controlling. Being able to adjust the envelope, filters, etc. of 20 or 30 instruments simultaneously would open the door for ridiculous synth stacks that aren't feasible with the current 4-knob limit.

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