Hello all!

The following can happen after a short interval of playing. When I start playing a note, the pitch goes slowly up and down, sometimes as much as an octave. It is not a LFO. Sometimes when I just switch it on, the pitch of the notes are about one octave up from where it should be. Switching the synth off and on sometimes can cure these problems.

So what do you guys think? I am on firmware 1.1.0. Maybe temperature related? The room is at least 90 degrees. Does the synth first need to warm up?

Thanks!

I'll answer my own question as i have now found out.

Yes, you can.  You need to ensure Global 2 - 1 is set to "TRI" rather than "NOR".

Thanks,
Steve

Thanks for all that information, Hector.  I didn't mean to exclude you from the question.  I removed your name from my post so as to make it more generally addressed to everybody. 

The Summit seems to be a possible replacement for a Poly Evolver Keyboard, especially with its stereo potential, thanks  to the two pairs of audio output jacks.  That's what caught my attention.  But I haven't seen any videos that exploited such a capability.

I took a quick look at Samplerobot and it does indeed look pretty good. I’m especially interested in its ability to automate things. Unfortunately, it’s a bit pricey for me, especially for a piece of software that I would probably use pretty infrequently (sigh).

I believe you asked (Sacred Synthesis) for my contribution to this thread after the points I raised in the Rev2 firmware updates/bugs thread. Although I see you’ve subsequently deleted that part of your post. Anyway as both a long term Dave Smith product buyer (P2000/P2002/P6) and someone who was a potential Rev2 customer And someone who bought a Summit in January 2021, here’s my view of the instrument and it’s bugs:

The Summit is stable enough and an awesomely capable instrument. It is a chameleon in it abilities. One that is not only able to produce great vintage analogue sounds, match most of the current crop of machines out there and take you on great hands on journeys to places you’ve never been.

The FPGA oscillators do perform better than any DSP based solution (Eg P12) and they provide a much wider set of features than any DCO or VCO synth. Having 3 oscillators all with a full complement of waveforms, shaping, sync, fm and wave table capabilities is a real shot in the arm for anyone interested in complex modelling or real instrument synthesis. I love it!

Perhaps the most important feature is the filter design. In addition to its ability to do impressively powerful 24db effects, it’s almost SEM 12db mode is also really nice.. all with very controllable resonance and both post and pre overdrive. Again for serious instrument modelling the dual mode filter option provides a very capable way of simulating real instrument resonance. So far I’ve used it extensively to model clavinets, trumpet, sax, guitar, Wurly and Rhodes. Not because I needed these sounds but because I’m amazed at how close you can get to these sounds on what is basically a fairly classic synth. It’s a testament to the the instrument’s flexibility.

I admit I’ve only scratched the surface. And everyday is a new adventure, especially with more experimental stuff. It’s huge fun!

Irritations and limitations: although the mod matrix does have way more slots than the Rev2. And even a separate section for efx. which is nice coz with complex modelling you can soon be knocking slot 16. The lack of the ability to cascade slots or as on the Blofeld, ‘the modifier’ which enables much more comprehensive source interaction, is at times frustrating. Novation/Huggett's method of combining two sources max in a multiply function goes some way to mitigating this, but there is no real way to adjust the level of each source and there are definitely times when you want a*b*c such as: mod wheel * lfo3*Ampenv this would provide a note gated Lfo to the overall vca at the depth of mod wheel… but you can’t!

There’s no pan destination!

Although the efx on the Summit are very good and there two complete sets of them.. they are not properly integrated with the synth engine. So the controls and the bus work against any real finesse. It feels to me that Novation just haven’t finished the design in this area.

So the Summit is not without it’s rough edges and bugs.

Summit bugs I know of:-

1. None of the 3 envelope generators track properly from lower values of decay to sustain. Decay levels between 4 and 30 cause the level to jump to meet the sustain level at the end of the decay phase.

2. The decay stage doesn't fade out in a natural, standard sounding log curve. It just drops like its a linear law volume curve.

3. Velocity added in the envelopes from the envelope menus doesn't properly multiply with the envelope contour it adds an offset!! For higher levels of velocity control added from this menu this has a gate like effect, reducing the influence of the envelop shape on the sound. For example a slow attack sound, becomes a fast attack with velocity added in this menu because the velocity added simply gates the contour on.

4. Velocity applied via a mod slot to the AmpEnv (to rectify the above error!) causes random clicks and pops on key gate on.

5. Summit effects are wonderful but the effects bus is utterly broken where changing the dry signal level also changes the wet level – yes they’re wired in series!!!

6. The current arrangement of the 3 digital effects in series or parallel creates some very limiting problems, particularly with the chorus. Out of the 3 effects, chorus is the only one that is configured to always pass the dry signal, when this is combined with the original dry signal there is a sort of phase cancellation effect (even when the chorus depth is turned to 0) this appears to be because there’s a DSP clocking delay of a few mSec between the original analogue signal and the DSP processed output. Really the 3 level controls should be wet/dry controls for each effect. There would then be no need for the analogue signal to be remixed.

7. User wavetables appear to be high frequency limited – this is possibly a Components bug. This has yet to be properly investigated

8. There's a bug in the midi system that fails to send/react to FM controls for the 3 oscillators.

9. There’s a bug in full 16 voice mode (the default mode) where voices 9 to 16 do not receive midi note commands.