Handy Hints

[gwenhwyfaer]

Just a thread to suggest that we have a "handy hints" section for getting the most out of the Fusion, whether sound generation, sequencing, or some other facet.

Here's one for starters, that I've suspected for a while but only confirmed the other day... incidentally, if I'm telling you something everyone's already discovered, can you tell me and I won't do it again?

Normally (ie. on sampled voices), the differences between the RP filter and the standard low pass 4-pole filter are pretty subtle; the RP filter only really comes into its own when you turn the volume up, because unlike the normal one it saturates at high levels (so it can be overdriven). Sampled voices can't generate that volume (and I've not played with the PM), but for analogue and FM voices you can let it rip; turn all the oscillators up to 100%, and you can hear a nice warm "boominess" (sorry, lousy description) to the RP filter that the normal one doesn't have. The filter overdrive becomes audible on the analogue oscillators once you have a cumulative analogue volume of about 130% or so (one oscillator on its own won't do it, but two will); but I believe that the FM oscillators at full stride are even louder, so you might be able to overdrive the filter using a single FM operator. Certainly, if you take one of Luc's DX piano patches and switch the filter to RP mode you get a much creamier e-piano sound, which is all down to the filter distorting (the cutoff "floats above" the harmonic structure of the voice).

However, you do have to turn the overall volume of the patch down to about 20% or so, otherwise you get clipping all over the place...

[mps]

That is a handy hint! It is great to have Gwen back in action. Thanks for the tip.

[gwenhwyfaer]

Thanks; I'm duly flattered

I've discovered something else about it too, that I really should have realised from the DX pianos. The sounds most strongly "coloured" by the RP filter are the sounds with relatively little harmonic content - stick a sine or triangle wave through a fully open one and you'll see what I mean. Triangle waves especially end up as almost sawtoothy... but too much harmonic complexity "drowns" the colouration (until the input level gets high enough to cause saturation).

[gwenhwyfaer]

Something else about the filters, in particular about why they don't self-resonate - when side-by-sided with my Micron, it turns out that 100% resonance on the Fusion corresponds to about 75-80% on the Micron. And the Micron doesn't start getting whistly (even on the Moog model) until about 90-95%. So if the parameter's range were increased a little bit, they probably could... (Dunno why I didn't do this ages ago.)

[mps]

I finally had some time to fool around with this over the weekend. Great tip! I was trying to reproduce a patch from the Arturia Arp 2600 softsynth. Boosting the 3 oscillators into the RP filter really got me close. Once I sort out the delay and filter envelope settings i think I will be there.

I am going to do some other eperiments with the demo versions of some softsynths and see how the Fusion VA engine does at reproducing them. So far It has done really well and anytime I have come up short is more likely to be my lack of understanding on how things really work,