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personally, i'm very tired about analog sounds... all the pulsar synts, with the except of few ones (vectron player - too expansive! - and lightwave) have the same structure: oscillator+filter. they are different, sound different from each other, but the "sound" is becoming boring for me!

what about a synth with wavetable, something like roland XV5080 or korg ones? it should not be so difficult adapting sts technology to such a synth? a (good) GM or XG sound source would be nice in pulsar!

Bosone (welcome back btw), the Vectron is a true wavetable synth and it can do a hell of processing, the free Player is only the 'tip of the iceberg'.
I once totally underestimated it and thought I could do the same with some crossfaded STS samples, bloody wrong.
The presets actually aren't 'ready to use' and have to be filled with life as only the most basic modulations sources and destinations are activated.
The Player doesn't have access to these pages, so the 'sound' indeed gets somewhat boring.
The Roland 'wavetable' you refer to is actually a sample playback like in the STS samplers.
You can do absolutely the same quality with STS if you are able to do such a good sound design.
It's not the synth engine which makes the Roland stuff shine but the highly sophisticated selection of well tuned samples.

cheers, Tom

I would like – among other things, exactly the same thing as Spirit when he said:

a synth designed to just do one thing really well. And what I'd like most is an ambient / soundscape machine.

These specific instruments should perform as no other instruments ever did in their own field. This is the point I think, high quality and innovation together into a single instrument.

Now I would like to talk about an old idea. Here’s my idea, which I have had for a couple of years in my head:

Let me explain first:
Think about any item that has overpopulated the market. The first item, as an innovation, gets to the streets and everybody is attracted and amazed, of course, it’s the first. Imagine your “Plastic Synth” by the early 70... Crazy! After 10 years, 350 competitors comes up and cover the whole of the market with similar items. We feel no more this excitement we used to feel. We have seen it for too long, and too much.

Which is the old and always effective trick to go out of it? To get even farther… Absynth did it, and became a whole new excitement in music creation.

So, what’s my point with this? We need something real extremely innovative with extreme possibilities, and at the same time, with conventional capabilities as well.

The idea:
A synth capable of going from percussive, to extremely high frequencies, back to extremely low frequencies, in morphing timbers, coming from a mixture of sonic elements being them samples and LFOs, with the capability of producing a sudden landscape chord, then a percussive kick, then rising bass which goes from an old moogy feeling to a distorted like guitar at the top, then going into chopped voices, etc… A synth that allows me to create absolutely effervescent, creative loops. All in one track, all using some simple programming to up to about 5 minutes for the combinations of timbers, samples and LFOs and sets of effects, the rest to be done through the Pitch Bend and Modulation wheels in real time.

Imagine you can play a b3 organ that comes to be a sitar after a few seconds, while a percussive sound is coming up till reaching the maximum point, transforming itself into a slapping bass, then into a piano which falls down becoming a deep sub bass capable of jumping now and then into a hat sound which opens and falls down in pitch to become a big inverse snare… And all this… in a 5 seconds loop, this would be a real new world. This is what I dream off.

Is it something mad, or is it possible? Cheers for participating to us your ideas Stephen…

Postdate: Something important to me:
I’d love to open a surface where everything parameter is a combination of other parameters, similar to the little square used in the Vectron player, where you can manipulate a dot inside a square and in just seconds, you are done. This is what I call efficiency!

Interesting ideas !

To take it further, how about a main control panel where you had, say, eight "X/Y" squares. Along the top of the control surface you have mnay little icons representing possible components.

To "build" your synth sound you drag and drop components onto the X & Y axis of each of the controller squares. For example, you might drop a 24dB filter on X and resonance on Y; on the next you drop filter EG amount and filter attack; on the next you drop portamento and a "time" icon.

The final "stage" in this construction is where you can then drop a "modulator pattern" into the square. For example, you could drop a "circle" onto the X/Y square that contains the filter and resonance, you then get a morphing sound. (Of course these must be BPM-synced). This "modulator pattern" is the same as if you manually moved the X/Y controller around. It could possibly work as an animation so you could see the little "ball" whiz around in it's pattern in sync to the bpm.

Morphing sounds sounds very interesting.

Spirit, you have read my mind when you say:

To take it further, how about a main control panel where you had, say, eight "X/Y" squares. Along the top of the control surface you have many little icons representing possible components.

Exactly!

what i really need is a reasonably priced GREAT eq.......

several oscillators, with a table to route specific notes/note ranges to the osc's (like a sampler).
integrated automation, so you can draw lines, like in a sequencer, and assign them to one or more function. this would be much more functional than the normal lfo/envelope/step seq. in the graph section, you would have a bpm/time based scale and a retrigger option. now, if one could use these time lines to morph between the osc's as well, that would be just great.

nestor, that's a crazy idea it sounds too good to be true. however, i have out of this world things in my head all the time, but bringing them to live through the speakers is another thing. how would you program such a synth? you have this 'progression' in your head, and when you start programming, in my case, the idea will have lost a lot of it's initial thoughts. to program such a synth, i would need a plug to connect to my brain, to import my ideas.
but it's a great thought for the 'supersynth'.
yes, a lot of moving balls in x/y pads oh, and if you would just be able to 'record' the figures you 'draw' in the x/y pad, like, again, sequencer automation, but repeatable (or not), mmmmhhh

Hi Borg…

I don’t think we are as far away as that of having such instrument… All it’s needed is a programmer with a strong aim, “the time”, I think perhaps about a year of hard, hard work. But I’m sure something similar is already possible…

I have no idea about the technicalities of these matters, I can just think about what I would like to have in my hands as a musician.

I would love, in fact, to have a FUL SCREEN of X/Y pads in little squares of about 5 centimetres per 5 centimetres each, all with slightly different colours from dark at dawn, to bright gradients at the top. A single 3D button per square and a little rectangle to the top, and another to the left of each square, showing the numbers of the X/Y positions, that’s it.

... and each little X/Y modulation pattern is connected to external real-world sensors linked to temperature, humidity, light, ambient noise, your breathing, neutrinos and background radiation !

I think pretty much of what's desired in this thread is already in the Vectron but burried behind the interface

It can rapidly change which samples drive the Oscillators, one can build own wavetables, it has multipoint and looping envelopes, crossfades and panning, and controllers composed from multiple parts even able to modulate themselves.
Imho way ahead of any Absynth, Virsyn etc stuff.
But imposible to dig within that one hour single demo shot.

I'd rather prefer a single XY surface with multi-colored items indicating the various controllers. Geometrical figures and curves could help a lot in 'drawing' the controller movements opposed to freehand drawing.

The hint to the 'Sounder' app (in the original post) isn't worth considering.
I thought there would be an improved version of some old stuff, but it's barely unusable, sorry for the hazzle.

cheers, Tom

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: astroman on 2003-02-01 15:10 ]</font>

Is that so? My impression of the Vectron wasn't astounding but then again, as you say it's impossible to evaluate it in an hour. I'm about to turn to the native for additional sources of inspiration, something like absynth, it appears to be more groundbreaking soundwise compared to Vectron or any other Pulsar synth imho. Not that the Pulsar stuff is no good, it just needs a twist...