Detuning Oscillators and creating patches

[LoboLives]

The Prophet 6 is my first Polysynth and while I love working with the patches and kind of using them as a basis I really want to get into create my own or duplicating some sounds I love. The one issue I have is detuning the oscillators. I get absolutely lost in terms of what Note and number to use for each and no matter how much I try to do it by ear, it just ends up sounding off. I was trying to recreate a "Jump" patch and trying to detune them to get a good brass sound and after an hour I gave up.

I did the same thing with I tried to duplicate a patch that was the synth on the Death Wish 2 soundtrack. _ADSR_ gave me some advice with the Polymod and Filter attack envelope but again tuning the oscillators and just trying to figure things out by ear I ended up frustrated.

When I'm working on the filter attack it sounds to be like it's not working or I don't really realize a difference in sound. I tried to do something as simple as recreate the brass sound on the Halloween 3 soundtrack and I couldn't even do something as simple as that.




Are my ears just bad? I'm not sure. I was tempted to actually contact Allan Howarth and ask him to give me advice on recreating the patches he made. I was also tempted to ask people on this form to show me how to do them.

What exactly is Polymod? What does it do exactly?

Any recommendations on what oscillator tunnings to use that are good for brass?

Is there a button similar to what was on the Prophet 12 where you could click and whatever knob or modulation you touched next assigned the modulation to that function? I can't remember what it's called.

I'm just new to it all and I've read the booklet and I've watched some videos and I'm still a bit confused.

[Jan Schultink]

You can try using the sound editor http://www.soundtower.com/prophet6/index.html to read the settings of some of the presets of the P6 to reverse engineer how they were created

[SpaceVoice]

 Any luck creating patches? I see it has been a while.
  I may never get around to creating a patch from scratch.
  I have experienced some issues with the sensitivity or range that is available when turning a knob.
 In some instances it would be helpful to have a wider range for more precise sounds & smoother transitions.
 Also I have found that after saving a patch I go back to it & it sounds different.
 Guess it just takes a lot of practice & patience.
 
 
 

[Sacred Synthesis]

Is this true also regarding the tuning of oscillators?  I'm an inflexible precisionist with such things.

[_ADSR_]

Is this true also regarding the tuning of oscillators?  I'm an inflexible precisionist with such things.

I think a master tune knob would be a great addition to the P6.  Master tune on the P6 is a menu dive and button increment/decrement action.  I find it easier to turn a knob and use my ears to listen for the beats where pushing a button you kind of lose that.

Other than that, it works the same as the P5.  Ocs 1 and 2 tuning knobs are incremental (1/2 steps) with Osc 2 having a fine tune.  This limits your detuning to Osc 1 being perfect and Osc 2 being either plus or minus.  To balance the 2 Osc's you need to detune the Master Tune, which is a menu dive (ex. Master tune -01 cents and then a plus fine tune adjust on Osc 2).

My biggest issue with this is that while in the menu other functions are disabled.  So you end up diving, coming back out to tweak Osc 2 and then re-diving, etc.

So the detune without menu diving works nice but to stay at A440 you need to get your scuba gear on

[Sacred Synthesis]

Is this true also regarding the tuning of oscillators?  I'm an inflexible precisionist with such things.

I think a master tune knob would be a great addition to the P6.  Master tune on the P6 is a menu dive and button increment/decrement action.  I find it easier to turn a knob and use my ears to listen for the beats where pushing a button you kind of lose that.

Other than that, it works the same as the P5.  Ocs 1 and 2 tuning knobs are incremental (1/2 steps) with Osc 2 having a fine tune.  This limits your detuning to Osc 1 being perfect and Osc 2 being either plus or minus.  To balance the 2 Osc's you need to detune the Master Tune, which is a menu dive (ex. Master tune -01 cents and then a plus fine tune adjust on Osc 2).

My biggest issue with this is that while in the menu other functions are disabled.  So you end up diving, coming back out to tweak Osc 2 and then re-diving, etc.

So the detune without menu diving works nice but to stay at A440 you need to get your scuba gear on

So how does one finely detune oscillator 1?  Using two Prophet 6s together would often mean detuning four oscillators by precise amounts.  A global detuning would not be sufficient.

[Paul Dither]

So how does one finely detune oscillator 1?  Using two Prophet 6s together would often mean detuning four oscillators by precise amounts.  A global detuning would not be sufficient.

There is no fine tune option for oscillator 1. If you'd like to detune two Prophet-6s towards each other, the only option is the one _ADSR_ mentioned, i.e. setting an individual value with the Master Tune parameter on each unit in increments of one cent. So basically you need to detune both synths as a whole and once you arrived at a good basis (between the usual 2-4 cents for such purposes), do the fine tuning (pun intended) with regard to the second oscillators.

Since Master Tune is a global parameter though, you can't save the preferred tuning behaviour between two Prophet-6s with each patch, so you'd need to work with a universal detuning range for your purposes if you don't want to retune the synths as a whole from patch to patch.