A History of Multitimbral Synthesizers

Hi pals

I just found this interesting article about the story behind synths that can be used nowadays with Scaler MMO

https://reverb.com/news/a-history-of-multitimbral-synthesizers

Have a good reading

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Good article . As synths got more complicated, the lines between Mono and Multi-timbral got blurred IMHO.

So my JD800 can operate in ‘single’ i.e. Mono mode, but which has up to 4 ‘tones’ (samples) which can be layered to make a patch. This approach is common in many synths. So you don’t always need a multi-timbral synth to make a humungous monster bass patch.

It can also operate in ‘multi’ mode, which gives 5 independent 4 tone voices pls a percussion voice.

The difference is that in multi mode effects are shared between all voices and differentiated by send/ receive routing; and in multi mode the voices will be presented on different midi channels.

Eric Persing, mentioned in the article for his programming of the D50, went on the also program the JD800, and then to found Spectrasonics and create Omnisphere; an underrated synth IMHO which can boast, for example, 64 LFOs and 160 discrete oscillators. It too, like the JD, has multilayers in a patch as well as then running them in 8 part multi-timbral mode.

For anyone interested in synth history, it’s worthwhile checking out the ‘keyfax’ books by Julian Colbeck , which give a pretty authoritative history of scored of synths.

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