very interesting

[CharlesFerraro]

I was reading this Synth Secrets article and it was talking about Gates and Triggers and then about how to make a flute sound...
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/nov99/a ... ecrets.htm

"if your synth can recreate the initial waveform of a flute (it's only a filtered sawtooth plus a little noise, after all), it follows that you need only use a transient generator (or two, or three...) to recreate the initial contours of the flute. Then you will be able to play a single note that sounds very much like a flute. And that's exactly how it is.

So this month's final Synth Secret, and the one that explains why some Contour Generators are calibrated in milliseconds rather than just '0' to '10' is:

If you want to recreate acoustic sounds or program interesting synthesizer sounds deterministically (rather than rely on blind chance) then, at the very least, you must be able to analyse and create the brightness and loudness contours of the sound.

But will you be able to use your wonderful flute patch to play a complete line or phrase in a way that sounds like a flute? If you are using an Odyssey (the decidedly superior synth a few paragraphs ago) the answer is "probably not". After all, no flautist chiffs every note individually, so permanent multi-triggering is a disadvantage. The Minimoog, on the other hand, allows you to retrigger some notes (by releasing the previous ones) and slur others (by overlapping them) much as the real flautist would do. When some people realise this — that particular synths are more suitable for certain tasks than others — they start collecting synths. In this case, the Minimoog is capable of producing a more realistic flute solo — but of course, you could always hunt down one of the rare instruments with a single/multi triggering switch, and then you would have the best of both worlds... If you start to think like this, watch out. A room full of synths is but an understanding bank manager away!"


If you own a RADIAS, pull up the RADIAS 2.0 patches and look for C11 Pied Piper which demonstrates an amaaazing flute patch. The voicing mode is mono with the MiniMoog style Single gate activated. Instead of a Saw the programmers stuck to sines, a triangle and noise generators (which I've read are better for wind's). If you play the higher two octaves and put the mod wheel up the sound really shines. Every staccato hit adds breath. Whoever the Korg programmers are they nailed the 'brightness contours' with the multimode filter and got a bullseye with the noise burst. V-Synth eat your heart out.