Synthesizer Help

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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Lunax
Posts: 26
Joined: Mon Sep 26, 2011 11:29 pm

Synthesizer Help

Post by Lunax » Sat Sep 08, 2012 6:53 pm

I hope I'm posting this in the right place. I'm new to music production and only know the basics of working with synthesizers. I recently downloaded the Sylenth Demo and had a couple questions about it.

What do the voices do on the oscillators? They go from 0 to 8. And there are some at the top that go in fractions like 0/34.

And what is polyphony mean and what does that do?

Sorry if these are common knowledge questions. I really don't know what these things are.

Just!Us
Posts: 16
Joined: Sun Sep 02, 2012 10:12 am

Re: Synthesizer Help

Post by Just!Us » Sat Sep 08, 2012 8:18 pm

So I'm not an expert :mrgreen: but I now the Sylenth quite well.
So the voices control how many voices every Osc plays. For example you need more than
1 voice to detune a Osc. Just by the way. The Voices screen at the top show how many voices are playing.
The polyphony screen shows how many notes you allowed to play. For example you leave the polyphony at 1 but you play 2 notes
the Sylenth will only play one note.
So hope this helped if you have more questions leave them at this post.

Lunax
Posts: 26
Joined: Mon Sep 26, 2011 11:29 pm

Re: Synthesizer Help

Post by Lunax » Sat Sep 08, 2012 8:55 pm

So does the voice do just that? Give a voice to the oscillator?

jtregoat
Posts: 7
Joined: Fri Sep 07, 2012 3:02 pm

Re: Synthesizer Help

Post by jtregoat » Sat Sep 08, 2012 9:50 pm

Lunax wrote:So does the voice do just that? Give a voice to the oscillator?
the more voices you have, the more polyphonic something becomes. so if you have a synthesizer with just one voice, it becomes monophonic...meaning you can only play one note as a time. as you increase the voices, you increase the polyphony, or amount of notes you can play at one time. so if you give one oscillator 2 voices and another 4, the first oscillator will only understand two notes at a time while the other oscillator will understand 4, meaning that you'll have a wider range with the second oscillator while limiting the first oscillator to a specific note or two...

at least, that's how i understand it

Lunax
Posts: 26
Joined: Mon Sep 26, 2011 11:29 pm

Re: Synthesizer Help

Post by Lunax » Sun Sep 09, 2012 9:54 pm

Oh. So like if I'm using only one oscillator and it has 2 and I press three notes it'll play the two newest ones and cancel out the first one since it can only do two at a time?

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