Questions about vintagezing

[sebber]

Hello everybody,

so, here's some questions that linger in my mind for quite a long time now. It's all about making the synth warm, or old, or vintage or whatever. I read up some stuff and so, basically it's irregularities on the old machine and toning down the octave between 10 and 20 khz.

Now, as far as irregularities go: I wonder why I see so little use of the shape oscillators. I see saturator modules in feedback loops and other stuff, but doesn't starting right at the beginning and using slightly offset waves be the first step? Sounds like a rant but it's actually a question

Secondly, the toning down: I realize that old analogue circuits just couldn't go this far up. Well, how about new analogue circuits? Would they have that problem now, too?

Thanks for enlightening me. It's getting darker and darker, some enlightening is in order.

Cheers
seb

[Lfohead]

[sebber]

Thanks, Lfohead, for your long answer. As much as I agree with your point in general, some knowledge about machines is necessary to become a good patcher. I would compare it to instrumental technique, just like a teacher would tell a student to hold the violin bow like this and this and then the sound gets better. http://www.electro-music.com/forum/topic-7237.html&postorder=asc is a good read, for example, telling me something about the specifics of digital systems and my ears and how to work with them. So, this is not about analogue vs. digital but simply about good sound, I totally agree with you here.

I'm currently redoing (restaurating?) a piece by Bernard Parmegiani for tape and three synthesizers. It's from 1980 and was written for a Synthi AKS, a Roland System 100M and a Yamaha CS-40M. The piece has not been played for 30 years now. Re-patching the sounds on a digital machine sometimes sounds better, sometimes worse. Whatever better and worse means and whoever can say what better and worse is. Anyway, when I though the original sounded better it was most often their imprecise waveforms which changed the sound the most, e.g. when going through a ring modulator. And I just wondered why I've never seen using the Osc Shape oscillators for mimicking analogue circuits.

[Electromagnetic Wave]

I do not consider myself as a analog specialist but I'll just add my two cents.

I remember the first time I tried to replicate the moog filter with an Access Virus tutorial. It explained how the resonance moves automatically when you move the cutoff. Each synthesizer has its secrets. I think it is better to focus to the architecture of a synthesizer, one by one.

[sebber]

Actually trying to do the exact same thing looks like this:
http://recherche.ircam.fr/pub/dafx11/Papers/99_e.pdf

That's really not my thing. I was just wondering why I don't see the Shape Oscillators used more often, especially when patching "analogue" style patches. E.g. Roland Kuit's Minimoog emulation in Laboratory of Patching does not use Shape Oscillators although I'm pretty sure that the Minimoog does not have such nice clean oscillators as the G2 has.

[Electromagnetic Wave]

I remember that the Shape Oscillators are bugged on the software demo and on old G2 OS but this is probably not the main reason.

[Vader77]

I find running thru a decent tape simulator helps especially the UAD Ampex.