Novation SUMMIT ?

OceanMachine

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #120 on: April 24, 2020, 01:19:08 PM »
Converted into a wavetable.

Sacred Synthesis

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #121 on: January 23, 2021, 04:12:09 PM »
Hey Soundquest, how would you compare the Summit with the Poly Evolver Keyboard?  Have you experimented with panning the Summit's output pairs in opposite directions for a Evolver-esque stereo depth?  Is one instrument warmer for rich pads than the other?  It seems from the outside as if a Summit would be a good substitute for a PEK.   
« Last Edit: January 23, 2021, 04:42:46 PM by Sacred Synthesis »

A Thousand Eyes

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #122 on: January 23, 2021, 05:55:32 PM »
I think the P12 is a more apt comparison than the PEK. I've owned a Peak, Evolver, and P12 module. Both DSI instruments are dirtier and have more character. The Peak sounds great and has a much better layout than the other two, but the filter didn't strike me as anything special. Although I prefer it to the extremely bland Waldorf Quantum that I briefly owned. The PX stereo filters are the best of the bunch (in that hybrid field), but I don't prefer them to the P6, P5/P10, or OB-6 filters.

I'm going to wait for the P12 successor that hopefully has SSI2140 filters.
« Last Edit: January 23, 2021, 06:39:56 PM by A Thousand Eyes »

Sacred Synthesis

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #123 on: January 23, 2021, 06:15:34 PM »
I had a Prophet 12 for a short while, and I'd agree that the Summit resembles it in tonal character.  But the Poly Evolver is a most unique instrument.  It can certainly sound nasty if you ask it to, but it also is capable of the sweetest richness and warmth.  I've found it unexpectedly to be a very difficult instrument to replace, however hard I try.

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #124 on: January 31, 2021, 01:20:21 PM »
Hey Soundquest, how would you compare the Summit with the Poly Evolver Keyboard?  Have you experimented with panning the Summit's output pairs in opposite directions for a Evolver-esque stereo depth?  Is one instrument warmer for rich pads than the other?  It seems from the outside as if a Summit would be a good substitute for a PEK.

Despite having the Summit for a quite a while now I really haven't pushed the experimentation envelope much yet.  I hope to be able to answer this better down the road.    I find the filter on the Summit being its strong point.  Just starting to play around with multi-layers. 
Sequential/DSI Equipment: Poly Evolver Keyboard, Evolver desktop,   Pro-2, Pro-3, OB6, P-12,
 

https://Soundcloud.com/wavescape-1

Sacred Synthesis

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #125 on: April 27, 2021, 09:52:46 AM »
I've been considering the Summit as a fitting replacement for my eight-voice Poly Evolver.  With the Summit's ability to create stereo patches with no parallel module needed, I don't see any other reasonably-priced instrument that could compare. 
« Last Edit: April 27, 2021, 10:20:37 AM by Sacred Synthesis »

jg666

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Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #126 on: April 27, 2021, 10:06:11 AM »
Well it would appear that they’re all part of the same family now with the acquisition of Sequential by the Focusrite group.
DSI Prophet Rev2, DSI Pro 2, Moog Sub37, Korg Minilogue, Yamaha MOXF6, Yamaha MODX6, Yamaha Montage6

Sacred Synthesis

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #127 on: April 27, 2021, 10:12:00 AM »
That's the funny thing.  I was struggling with the idea of getting a non-Sequential poly synth, and now Novation is like the next door neighbor.

jg666

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Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #128 on: April 27, 2021, 10:13:43 AM »
That's the funny thing.  I was struggling with the idea of getting a non-Sequential poly synth, and now Novation is like the next door neighbor.

Yes indeed, it wouldn’t feel so bad now that it’s ‘part of the same clan’
 
DSI Prophet Rev2, DSI Pro 2, Moog Sub37, Korg Minilogue, Yamaha MOXF6, Yamaha MODX6, Yamaha Montage6

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #129 on: April 27, 2021, 11:57:58 AM »
Wow, First I hear of this acquisition.   Well at least its with a good company and I would imagine there will be symbiotic advantages. 

Sacred Synthesis.  From what I know of your tastes, and your current lineup, and if you were to replace that with something new and affordable,  the Summit really fits the bill.  Sure, some day that may all change if Sequential ever releases a full Poly in the likes of  your loved PO8/ PEK/P12/ and once considered Rev 2.  But I'm glad I didn't wait for that to happen and got the Summit when I did.  Despite the fine looking recent releases from Sequential, there is no guarantee that Sequential will do an instrument like what I'm envisioning (meaning to replace the PEK with all the trimmings).  So,  if that dream synth does ever come out from Sequential, then I always have the option to sell the Summit.

Speaking of selling,  I think I'm going to sell the Nord Lead 4.  I just don't use it much anymore.  The quad layers are really something impressive and that ability is unavailable on other hardware as far as I know.  Yet,  I found I rarely got above using two layers anyway.    The ease of  getting a good fm piano was its strong point.   Really all sorts of sounds were easily gotten on it.    My summary of it after owning it for quite a few years now would be that I think its designed more of a stage instrument perhaps.   I don't really have much bad to say about it other than lack of AT, and some odd key combinations to get into various settings.  Anyway, with the Summit, and now, the Hydrasynth-which I recently added, there is enough fm overkill ;)

Sequential/DSI Equipment: Poly Evolver Keyboard, Evolver desktop,   Pro-2, Pro-3, OB6, P-12,
 

https://Soundcloud.com/wavescape-1

Sacred Synthesis

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #130 on: April 27, 2021, 12:17:24 PM »
I'm trying to update my whole set up, so this is a good period for deciding about the Summit.  I haven't heard a single video that explores the stereo possibilities for the two sets of outputs, but they certainly seem Evolver-esque.  The question is whether the Summit is lush enough.  It seems to be.
« Last Edit: April 27, 2021, 12:19:07 PM by Sacred Synthesis »

timboréale

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Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #131 on: April 27, 2021, 04:56:47 PM »
Personally I don't like the Peak nor Summit sound, I've written about this elsewhere so I won't repeat myself, but you may find it a little soulless even after extensive work. Or maybe pure and perfect without character ("angelic", perhaps? Not to do disservice to actual angels...) is what you want?
Prophet 6 keyboard, Rev2-16, Prophet 12 Keyboard, Nords, etc...

Sacred Synthesis

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #132 on: April 27, 2021, 05:31:53 PM »
I felt that way about the Prophet 12 after listening to videos for a few years; it seemed very dry, caustic, and sterile.  But then I was loaned one for a month and set it up using both sets of output jacks.  After some diligent programming, the difference was night and day.   

Regardless, tell me more about the Summit, if you can.  I'm interested in hearing about all positives and negatives.   

timboréale

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Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #133 on: April 27, 2021, 07:10:46 PM »
Well I should be clear that my experience is largely with the Peak, but I played the summit enough pre-COVID restrictions to ascertain there wasn't any particular difference in the aspects which bothered me - at which point I was no longer interested in either form of the instrument.

I feel like the Summit/Peak oscillators are not at all like the P12s, which have a more organic charm to them. As I am myself trained in DSP and implement it professionally, my general sense is that imperfections *of specific types* are essential to a pleasing, "musical" quality of tone and other types of imperfections, or the absence of them entirely, create a more alien sense - at best merely bland or boring, at worst actively painful to some sensitive to such things. Nearly all of the sounds of nature are a combination of resonance, filtering, delay, and the interactions of these upon each other at audio rate or lower modulation frequencies. For instance, in a bell the multiple resonances of the structure as they vibrate interact with each other, and as the physical structure thus physically moves to create the oscillations, the resonant frequency of its key dimensions also changes - this is a resonant form of FM in a natural expression. We become thus accustomed to the abilities of natural materials to do this work, and nature tends to work with specific ratios, harmonicities, etc. which then communicate on a psychological level to our brain with various forms of meaning and emotion. Lacking such a connection we do not sense the same things, and can often find them "unnatural" in a not-pleasing manner. I am not speaking of noise - noise is quite natural in many instances, so is distortion, waveshaping, etc.

I say all of this because one of the things I have noticed about the ongoing "perfection" of digital oscillators and even digital filters (which I personally find very disinteresting - please do note that I don't mean good and beautiful music cannot be made from them - I have personally made "acoustic" and very pleasing timbres with my various Nord Leads) is that the more they strive for high bitrates and the avoidance of antialiasing and other properties via brute force (e.g. sample at such a high rate that the aliasing becomes inaudible, then either filter it out or don't care at all about it)  -- the more pure the oscillator sounds at first, but also the more boring it is without a significant amount of additional work to alter that perfection which was attained at such efforts to begin with. The opposite approach - designing a normal nyquist-rate or low-oversampling ratio (e.g. 2x or so) oscillator that doesn't care much about antialiasing - just sounds poor to begin with, but that is an obvious and unnatural variant and thus is more readily noticed and rejected. I don't have a perfect answer (there is none in the discrete-time world, I don't believe) but oscillators which run at roughly 48-96kHz and use careful mathematics rather than brute force for aliasing reduction have consistently caught my ear as "musical" in my estimation - though this is not a hard and fast rule, just something I notice in my own auditioning.

I suspect, only through a preponderance of experience, that this may be related to the fact that very high harmonics are often found in nature with quite a lot of complex variance (audio rate FM, I would suppose) when they do occur - not necessarily enough to be obvious, but enough that the additional sidebands caused by the variance are subtlely picked up. Nature is full of extremely subtle modulations like this and when they are not there we miss them. One of the issues, then, with extremely high bitrate oscillators is that in many cases they process their modulation at this high rate as well and often that means that artifacts caused by "lower fidelity" oscillator architectures are gone - and my core theory is that these artifacts of various kinds are a substitute for the complexity the ear expects to hear in the modulation of the fundamental timbre. In other words, rather than getting a pitch modulated at near-audio rate in steps (which cause artifacts on top of the fundamental and the modulating waveform), you get a pitch perfectly modulated in beyond-audio-rate which yields ONLY the exact (in the audio spectrum, at least) sidebands of the modulation, nothing more. This nothing more is the problem, not a feature, in my estimation - though again I must be quick to point out that any artifacting that might "solve" the problem is only a substitute for a natural complexity and not ideal. The artifacts can be of various natural or unnatural aspect and of course not all of them are pleasant or "musical".

Anyways, enough of the bloviating. You can see my point, I trust, that perfection in digital oscillators is not, in and of itself, any benefit without immense complexity in modulation, and that makes programming a great and natural feeling sound much more difficult and a process of greater effort (and in many ways undoes some of the point of having such oscillators in the first place) - and that for synths which have artifacts and other imperfections which *do* lean musical, often those can be preferable and a faster way to the core timbres that one might be looking for.

The Peak/Summit, to me, are exactly this: bland by nature, and while you *can* work hard to make them sound interesting (and, I won't say I've ever heard it, but I'll allow perhaps even "glorious" *might* be possible), there is nothing in them that makes them remotely worth that level of effort or investment for me, when I can get that and much more in spades in many other instruments (I even prefer the quick sounds I get from my Nord Lead 3, frankly, for at least some subset of the possible sounds I might want to make - though I'll give it to the Peak for strings over the Lead 3 - but I'd not choose either of them for strings, for instance, to begin with).

Onboard effects on a synth are not particularly valuable to me (although an onboard delay or 4 is most welcome, because I view delay as fundamental to a timbre and not an "effect" that is added onto it later), so the Peak/Summit's value there is of no interest to me. And their filters are certainly nothing to write home about - they are pleasant, competent filters. But again, lacking anything special.

Overall, while I think I am generally leaning towards the digital oscillator/analogue filter as a sort of ideal architecture for the stuff I find myself most appreciating, I don't find the Peak/Summit to offer a compelling argument.

Take all this with a large grain of salt or a glass of seawater as you prefer and know that it is one opinion and not gospel, as it were.
Prophet 6 keyboard, Rev2-16, Prophet 12 Keyboard, Nords, etc...

Sacred Synthesis

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #134 on: April 27, 2021, 07:21:33 PM »
Thanks for the mighty effort there!  You're preaching to the choir.  I happen to share many of the same views, but I have no immediate experience with the Summit.  I find sterility to be the worst sonic quality of all, so I'll keep your comments in mind.
« Last Edit: April 27, 2021, 07:23:24 PM by Sacred Synthesis »

jg666

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Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #135 on: April 27, 2021, 10:56:34 PM »
I believe Geosynths has released packs for the Peak which are also usable on the Summit. It might be worth a quick listen to some of his patches to get a feel for what sort of sounds he can get out of the Peak/Summit?
DSI Prophet Rev2, DSI Pro 2, Moog Sub37, Korg Minilogue, Yamaha MOXF6, Yamaha MODX6, Yamaha Montage6

Sacred Synthesis

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #136 on: April 28, 2021, 05:34:50 AM »
Yeah, he's great at sound design.  But I don't think there's any question about the Summit's capabilities - not, at least, in my case.  It's only the overall tonal character that's in question, which is a very hard thing to judge online.

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #137 on: April 28, 2021, 11:47:17 AM »
 I'm pretty sure those videos or soundtracks will surface, if not already there, that will allow the Summit sound to speak for itself.    I too, was a little apprehensive whether I watched P12,  Peak, or even Summit videos early on.   I think I even commented negatively on the Peak when it first came out.   But the Summit, as well as the P12, sound is deep as you want them to be.  I know this now.

Also just another opinion in the stack....  The split filter ability on Summit is very nice.  Yes, the oscillators are very precise and sampled at high rate.  And yes, you do indeed notice this, but in a good way, especially up top where the traditional aliasing is not detectable.    But if you don't like intrinsic clean, Novation built in adjustable controls which are quite simple to use, to make this analog like or warm as you wish without working hard.  This feature became evident to me right away,  yet is used sparingly in some of the onboard patches.   It's located in the oscillator control section.  One control is like a drift and the other knob (that I cannot recall the name of) is like a phasing slop thing.  Any patch I would make would employ this feature since this is what I'm most used to I guess.

There's a lot of critiquing over sound quality of these newer instruments, no matter manufacturer.  I guess I get it,  that's what we do- like golfers would haggle over clubs ;)   But the unlevel playing field sometimes is that amps, headphones, speaker choice and even recording method that the reviewer uses to employ.  Unfortunately in the age of dying music store show rooms, we rely on youtube as the level field.  I kind of dread those videos done using just audio off of phone. ;)


Sacred Synthesis, you had a question on the stereo on Summit.  I haven't played with this much as I have not used the multi-layers all that much yet.  There was actually a youtube video out there a few months ago of an older gentleman explaining how to split between the 4 output jacks and layers to get a bigger stereo sound.  I see no reason multi-layering and panning cannot be done as same as on P12.  The spread knob, in the voice section, seems to provide a nice spacing of the voices.
Sequential/DSI Equipment: Poly Evolver Keyboard, Evolver desktop,   Pro-2, Pro-3, OB6, P-12,
 

https://Soundcloud.com/wavescape-1

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #138 on: April 28, 2021, 01:10:47 PM »
I'm pretty sure those videos or soundtracks will surface, if not already there, that will allow the Summit sound to speak for itself.    I too, was a little apprehensive whether I watched P12,  Peak, or even Summit videos early on.   I think I even commented negatively on the Peak when it first came out.   But the Summit, as well as the P12, sound is deep as you want them to be.  I know this now.

Also just another opinion in the stack....  The split filter ability on Summit is very nice.  Yes, the oscillators are very precise and sampled at high rate.  And yes, you do indeed notice this, but in a good way, especially up top where the traditional aliasing is not detectable.    But if you don't like intrinsic clean, Novation built in adjustable controls which are quite simple to use, to make this analog like or warm as you wish without working hard.  This feature became evident to me right away,  yet is used sparingly in some of the onboard patches.   It's located in the oscillator control section.  One control is like a drift and the other knob (that I cannot recall the name of) is like a phasing slop thing.  Any patch I would make would employ this feature since this is what I'm most used to I guess.

There's a lot of critiquing over sound quality of these newer instruments, no matter manufacturer.  I guess I get it,  that's what we do- like golfers would haggle over clubs ;)   But the unlevel playing field sometimes is that amps, headphones, speaker choice and even recording method that the reviewer uses to employ.  Unfortunately in the age of dying music store show rooms, we rely on youtube as the level field.  I kind of dread those videos done using just audio off of phone. ;)


Sacred Synthesis, you had a question on the stereo on Summit.  I haven't played with this much as I have not used the multi-layers all that much yet.  There was actually a youtube video out there a few months ago of an older gentleman explaining how to split between the 4 output jacks and layers to get a bigger stereo sound.  I see no reason multi-layering and panning cannot be done as same as on P12.  The spread knob, in the voice section, seems to provide a nice spacing of the voices.

You mean the “diverge” function which basically introduces fixed tuning offsets on the voices. There’s also one of these controls in the filter section which affects the cutoff and I think envelope timings. Adjusting these parameters does indeed yield a more pleasing analogue-type imprecision to the sound. 

Sacred Synthesis

Re: Novation SUMMIT ?
« Reply #139 on: June 19, 2021, 04:42:31 PM »
Do you Summit owners find that the instrument has a lot of bugs?  How is Novation support over this?