Organimation vs Kronos CX-3 Engine

[carmol]

Samples are not that important,
tonewheels are simple waveforms, easily
reproducible with modeling, and the same
for keyclick and leakage.
We are not speaking about the complexity
of a grand piano waveforms and its string resonance.
Instead, is not feasible a good emulation
of single triggering of the percussion with samples.

What make a clone sound close or
far from the real thing is mainly the leslie simulation,
that is not reproducible with sampling.

[SanderXpander]

I have to disagree about the tone/clonewheels not being that important. My XB1 is a lot better than my MOSS board, even without its crappy leslie sim, and my Nord is better than the XB1.

The leslie is an important part of the sound, true (the Nord is a lot better than the XB1 in this respect), but I wouldn't say the sound of the actual tonewheels is "not that important".

[shawnhar]

I think more important than the timbre of a standalone tonewheel is the way they interact when playing more than one note at a time.

Play two notes an octave apart on a real organ, and you get a radically different sound to sampling those two notes individually, then triggering both samples at the same time. The nature of how tonewheels work has implications for overall levels and phase of harmonics which are quite different to what you get from playing back samples, and an important part of common organ playing techniques.

I think this is why I've never really liked any sampled organ. I'd take poor wheel tone with proper phase of harmonics any day, over a high quality sampled version without that proper interaction between multiple notes.

[jimknopf]

Tonewheels are defininitely no simple waveforms. The real tonewheels produced slightly uneven waveforms for electro-mechanical reasons, which in connection and interaction with each other and other essentials create a complex, vivid overall sound far from trivial.

Up to now no single clonewheel organ has been able to supply an exact or really close to exact copy of the original B3s. There's always something missing overall, be it wheel sound, vibrato character (no clonewheel comes even close to the fat, smooth B3 vibrato up to this day), keyclick, percussion character etc.

[drchris]

So what's the verdict? Is Organimation worth the $40, or are these sounds easily created in CX-3 individually?

I'm thinking the $40 isn't very much and they sound really good, but looking for your opinions.

thanks!
Chris

[DaveBoulden]

In my personal opinion, it's worth the $40 for a better starting point for your own tweaking. Indeed, that's exactly why I bought it. YMMV

[shawnhar]

I think this is the same as any collection of synth presets. If you are a tweaker who likes to program your own sounds, paying for them doesn't really make sense, but if you just want a range of good sounds ready to go, that can be a sensible purchase.

Synth presets are different to sample libraries in this regard, as no matter how good a tweaker you may be, you can't make your own samples unless you have access to the original instrument!

[Scott]

You don't want to use samples if you can avoid it in B3 emulations. The problem is, when you're piling these sine wave samples on top of each other, as you would in a drawbar simulation, they need to be phase-lock otherwise you get phase cancelation.

Here's an example from a Yamaha XS and you can hear the tone changing all over the place.

This doesn't happen within the CX-3 organ.

XS Organ

Busch.

Great example. Which XS patch is that? Is it one of the Organimation add-ons?