16 voice mono/8 voice stereo dual timbral upgrade of the P12 is what I'm hoping for at the moment. With an FPGA front-end to eliminate aliasing like on the PEAK. SSM filters plus analog HiPass filter per voice. Put an enhanced FX engine at the end of the chain as well.
I could speculate all the time about what it should include in synthesis, but as long as it has VA, FM, Wavetable and Formant synthesis I'd be happy...
I'd just like to see the P12 upped to the current hardware and design specs that DSI has put in their newer creations before I decide on getting a Prophet 12.
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With that said, there is something I'd like to see made one day, though it'll probably never happen... a kind of "mellotron like" sampler that behave in a very special way. I do not think I've seen anything do this, but here goes:
Every key on the keyboard should be it's own 48KHz, 16bit playback device... it should be able to play back a single looped sample at this exact rate and bit depth... no need to even pitch shift anything... just a lot of simple 44.1Khz 16bit sampleloop playback devices (see them a bit like a lot of looped tapes like in the Mellotron).
Now, an instrument is then build up of a looped sample for each of these keys... whenever you hit a key, the VCA for that sample will open and close as per a VCA envelope as usual, gating the sample.
The samples should be able to either retrigger on a gate, or simply be free running, the latter being VERY IMPORTANT since this will eliminate any static transients normally associated with samplers... the looped samples just simply needs to be carefully created to not have more movement going on in them, than they will sound good when gated in free running mode.
This in essence means that you would have a polyphony of 128 voices, but each key can only be triggered in mono... this has it's own charm all by itself.
It also means though, that VCAs would have to be digital, and not analog ones.... if any filter is to be added to each key as well, these should also be digital ones.. .the reason is obvious; you'd need 128 analog VCFs and VCAs if not... anything that should be per key, must be done digitally, or the cost and size would blow out of proportion. But this is not at all that bad since the samples can have all the analog character you could put into them anyway, and the quality would be pristine on ALL KEYS because they do no pitch transposition... so no aliasing.
Of course there should be the usual depth of the synth engine with modulation matrix for the digital VCA/VCF stuff.
I'd also like to see a CHARACTER section for each key giving you sampl emanipulation tools like bit crush, sample rate reduction and other "per sample based" tricks.
But we all know that we want something analog, at least something hybrid... and this is where I'd like for DSI to try something different... put in an ANALOG effects engine after the digital sample playback engine instead to warm up the digital part:
A real stereo analog BBD delay with feedback that will allow you to choose from different modulation FX like Chorus/Flanger/Phaser/Stringer Ensemble/Delay
A real stereo analog distortion/Waveshaper
A real stereo analog ring modulator
A real stereo analog filter (LP, HP and BP)
and in the end, the usual digital FX engine focusing on Delays and Reverbs
... if such a thing was available, it would make it on my top priority list for sure...
Samples could be imported by a simple SD card slot having folders that include all 128 looped samples for an instrument. There would not even be any need to create software for any mapping, as each sample name could just follow a simple naming structure, and editing the samples you can find lots of third party software for.
The trick is in the preparation of the samples... but the sheer amount of possibilities are staggering when you think about it... you could have a choir sample looped on all keys (if too many keys because of the human pitch range, keys can simply be left out) making it very realistic... you could sample any vintage synth or other on every key and have it play back perfectly without any chipmunk effects... you could put acoustic instrument's sustained notes in giving you a natural formant feel all over the keys... and even synthetically generated complex waveforms that retain formants or the like for every key.
Such a synth would be one hell of a PAD machine... it would be a dream synth for ambient genres for sure.
actually some of this could also be simulated on the Prophet X, if they just made a single feature update that would allow you to start playback of a sample at a random spot in the sample at each keypress... a rather simple feature addition really... it is not exactly like a free running sample of course, but it would still eliminate tha static feel of a retriggered sample...
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