Example of three voice polyphony on the Dotcom

[Scot Solida]

7thDanSound's video inspired me to dust off my old MPU-101 and try patching up a three-voice polyphonic patch on the Big Fella. Here's a short clip:

http://www.theelectronicgarden.com/Scot/PolyCom.mp3

I used the MPU-101 in 3-voice mode and patched three complete, two-osc voices using six oscillators, three filters, six enveloper generators three VCAs and a mixer. The filters weren't all exact matches (two state variable jobs in lowpass mode and a Trans-ladder), but I matched the sound of the odd-man-out as closely as I could.

I sent the Dotcom keyboard's MIDI out to the MPU-101 and played the chords on that. I could do four voices (I have thirteen oscillators and eight ADSRs, plus plenty of filters), but it got a little too thick when I tried that.

This may be a silly exercise... after all, I have a Prophet-5 and an OBXa sitting across the room from the Big Fella, but heck, it was still fun (and patch-cable intensive)

[bwhittington]

Nice, Scot! The patch kind of made me think of the incidental music in Clockwork Orange.

Cheers,
Brian

[Scot Solida]

Thanks Brian... like I said, it was an exercise, so the patch and the clip are quickies just to see if it would work. I'm quite happy with the results. Trying not to buy another Q-107...

(as an aside, the full-length version of "Timesteps" is my favorite recording... ever.)

[kindredlost]

The Prophet and Oby are ultimate but there is something chaotic and organic about hearing a spaghetti cluster-fuck patch with too many random elements. Kudos.

[Scot Solida]

Thanks. It was the OB that first got me thinking about it. I spent ages calibrating the OB's voice cards but even so, they aren't exact matches and it makes for a huge sound. That got me wanting to do something like that with the modular... but I forgot about it until 7thDanSound posted his experiment with the MPU-101. The modular is certainly more chaotic, especially since one of the three voices has a different filter. I might try doing a patch with different filters on all of the voices next.

[7thDanSound]

Awesome! It sounds really cool with proper full featured voices with filters and envelopes on each. I lack the modules to try something like that so thanks very much for taking your time and patching it up! I did four VCOs in my video for a short while but felt that for the melody/chord part it just got too much. I imagine the polyphonic modular must've sounded really huge in person

Well done!

[Scot Solida]

Thanks... it sounds almost too big in person. Like you say, with four VCOs in it gets to be too much. Same with this one. The playable range is somewhat limited. For instance, chords at the low end of the keyboard are just overwhelming - at least with this particular patch.

[Christopher W.]

Between your post and the one from Nik (7th Dan) I'm left kicking myself for only splashing out on a single channel MIDI-CV converter when - for the price of a module or two - I could have purchased an 8-channel unit.

[7thDanSound]

I don't know why it is though because with regular polys it doesn't get too much. Maybe they have inferior oscillators or tuning schemes that keep things more in order?

I'm dying to gather up two more MiniMoogs to test 4 voice Mini sounds Or six of them for that matter for a true MemoryMoog architecture! My MPU101 wouldn't be able to handle that though...