Vector Synthesis
The Joystick of Sequential Circuit's Prophet VS Synthesizer made it possible to change the sound in realtime before it reached the filter section. This was done by selecting 4 out of 128 digital waveforms and... well read it yourself here.

The patch below lets you crossfade between four oscs with the Pitch Stick for horizontal movement and with the Wheel for vertical movement (I assumed a square field with one Osc in each corner. If your pitch stick is a rhombus you need to apply some maths you can find here.)

Of course you don't have to use Oscs, you can crossfade between the four inputs or anything else, so basically this is just a control patch.

vector.pch2.jpg

Vector.pch2

This is what Dave Peck sent to the mailing list:
"... and of course you can automate it with LFOs instead of a joystick.
Also, you can add more variation by NOT crossfading

1/2 and 3/4 with the same control source -

- crossfade sources 1/2 with LFO "A"

- crossfade sources 3/4 with LFO "B" at a different frequency

- crossfade the outputs of the first two crossfaders using a third crossfader with LFO "C" at yet another frequency.

Now you get a constantly changing mix of the four signals. I built a few patches based on this idea, and some of them took it a step further -

First, I used a set of three crossfaders to create a constantly changing mix of four oscs:

#1 Fat PWM

#2 FM sine osc sweep

#3 Sine thru wavewrapper sweep

#4 Sawttoth hard sync sweep

Then the final osc crossfader output goes through four different filters in parallel:

#1 Fat LPF with low resonance

#2 Hi resonance HPF

#3 Mid resonance BPF

#4 Vocal filter

...and the outputs of these four filters are sent through ANOTHER set of three crossfaders with more asyncronous LFO control. This creates all kinds of bizarre, sweeping timbre changes. An example is a patch called "Automatic2.pch", probably in the archive."

Yeah, but why stick with 2-dimensionality? Here's a 3-dimensional one. Please note the extraordinary artistry of my notepad-drawing. Remember that the G2 has 600 knobs, all you need is 2400 sources.

3dvector.pch2.jpg

3DVector.pch2

Last Updated ( Sunday, 02 September 2007 )