Changing a mono patch to poly while maintaining the same sound

[raytea9]

There are some patches that are mono but once they are made poly (pressing Unison) the sound changes drastically. I've been trying hard to figure out what parameters need to be played with to bring the poly version as close as possible to the mono one. I understand it's probably a case by case thing and there's no one fix but in case there was some kind of an approach, I would be grateful to learn about it.

[lewisfrancis]

One way to get a polyphonic version of the T5 unison effect would be to buy 4 more T5s and send one note of a chord to each synth to generate.

Or do the Wendy Carlos thing and record 5 passes of a given unison patch into a daw, with each pass being one note of a chord.

[kpatz]

Unison mode can use 1 to 5 voices.  If it’s a simple mono 1 voice patch, switching unison off should make it poly without changing the sound much.  If it’s using 2-5 voices or Chord mode, then the sound will change as you’ll have one voice per note instead of 2-5.

Some ways around this: try using effects to thicken up the sound, like a short delay or chorus, or multitrack the unison patch in a DAW or sampler to get “polyphony” from it.  Or just live with the thinner poly sound, which will work better than a thick unison sound when playing chords from it anyway.