[LAD] Selectable limit for polyphony of virtual synth

[Ralf Mardorf]

Hannu Savolainen wrote:
> Albert Graef wrote:
>   
>> hollunder at gmx.at wrote:
>>   
>>     
>>> One obvious question there is:
>>> what should the synth do when it reaches the limit?
>>> There are several things that are possible and afaik implemented in
>>> synths. It could drop the first note played, or the highest, or ...
>>>     
>>>       
>> Well, that's called voice stealing. Most synths do it, if they don't
>> have dynamic voice allocation. Usually, you assign voices in a round
>> robin manner, and the oldest note has to go when you're running out of
>> voices.
>>
>>   
>>     
> Ideally the synth should use some kind of priority mechanism when 
> stealing voices. Killing the oldest one is not the best way. For example 
> some kind of psychoacoustic algorithm could be used to find voices that 
> are masked out by the other voices playing at louder levels. Some voices 
> may have decayed to inaudible levels or their pitch may be close enough 
> to the new note to be played.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Hannu

Hi Hannu :)

this is a good idea to cover unwanted cutting. "My problem" is, that 
most virtual synth have enough voices ;). I would like to have the 
effect of old synth, e.g. listen to Peter Gabrial's pad sounds. It's 
wanted to hear the cutting, because it has a musical function, it 
produces ambience. My fault was, that I only referred to the elimination 
of muddy sound by notes with long release times, I've forgotten to bring 
up the musical function.

I like to have the effect that chords will be cut by new cords, similar 
to the effect for monophonic sounds, with one difference, sometimes one 
or two notes shouldn't be cut. There are some very good synth with a 
polyphony of 5 or 6 voices, e.g. the Prophet 5 or the Matrix 6, btw. I'm 
using a Matrix-1000 (the 1000 is for 1000 sounds in the memory, resp. I 
didn't check if the battery is still fine, it might be possible that the 
200 RAM sounds of my Matrix are lost ;)).

For most of my external synth and 'virtual' synth I'm missing this 
effect, they never run out of voices. It's bad not to have enough 
voices, but if you have enough voices than some charm gets lost.

I don't know actual Peter Gabriel recordings, but I bet he still uses 
old synth, e.g. the Fairlight, especially for pad sounds.

Cheers,
Ralf