Questions about voices

[IceTre]

Please forgive me, I'm still a beginner when it comes to synthesizers.  I have a question about voices.  I'm hoping someone can educate me.

When you press a key, then a voice is played, right?  If you play a triad, then 3 voices are played, and so forth, right?

If the sound has a release time, then voices sustain pass the release of the key, so you need more voices than the keys depressed in order to hear the new voices, or else there is "voice stealing", right?

One voice could be two (or more) oscillators, combined, right?

I have heard of combining two (or more) voices into one key press.  But the combined voices use the same oscillator and filter settings, right?  Or is there a way to have, say, a third or fourth oscillator, with different settings, all on one voice?

Sorry if these sound like beginner questions, but they are from a beginner!

[g3o2]

While the signal generation chain settings are the same for each voice, on synths using analog components at least, the sound of each voice will be slightly different for each voice because anything that oscillates (including LFO) will do so continuously and indifferently from you pressing a key.

[558]

Please forgive me, I'm still a beginner when it comes to synthesizers.  I have a question about voices.  I'm hoping someone can educate me.

When you press a key, then a voice is played, right?  If you play a triad, then 3 voices are played, and so forth, right?

If the sound has a release time, then voices sustain pass the release of the key, so you need more voices than the keys depressed in order to hear the new voices, or else there is "voice stealing", right?

One voice could be two (or more) oscillators, combined, right?

I believe the Release or Sustain envelopes will be the same for every voice except in the cases where you may modulate some type of filter envelope with an Oscillator B.  Like that other poster said, if you are modulating something with something, you may find a different quality to the voices.  You can achieve all sorts of sounds by doing this, using unison also can make different weird things happen.  The Unison+Modulations can cause a sweeping stepping thru the voices, which may go faster as the higher octave keys are pressed or slower as the lower octave keys are pressed.  The filter can make sounds, when no oscillator is in the mix section.  So you turn both Osc A and Osc B and Noise volumes in the Mixer section down (and I am talking about the Prophet 10 Rev 4 now and I suppose it is similar to the other Prophet 5 Revs and the Prophet 5 Rev 4 here) and there is still sound coming from the synth because it is the filter that makes the sound and there is a lot of sounds like this in my User bank. 

I have heard of combining two (or more) voices into one key press.  But the combined voices use the same oscillator and filter settings, right?  Or is there a way to have, say, a third or fourth oscillator, with different settings, all on one voice?

When you use Unison, you are combining the voices into one key press.  Poly Unison will put all possible voices into each press automatically judging by how many keys are pressed.  Chord Unison will put the 3 different notes (or 2 or 5 or whatever) that you pressed when selecting Cho into each key press.  That means 3 voices (or 2 or 5 or whatever) get used for each note pressed as long as Chord Unison is on. 

There are a lot of ways to have more than one voices sounding with a key press using Unison.

There are also multiple oscillators on each voice.  The A and B oscillator are easily set to different frequencies with the Sync button switched off and you hear both for every voice.  So that means in a 10 voice Prophet 10 you could be hearing I suppose 20 frequencies right there and it could be a real huge amount of cacaphony or it could be very cool sounding it all depends on how you have everything set up you know?  There's all kinds of sounds horrible and wonderful and glitchy and sublime. 

That LFO can be modulating the frequencies, the frequencies can be modulating the pulse widths or frequencies or filter...that's a lot of different things you can bake into a sound.  It can be quite unexpected.  Harmonics will happen as well using filter resonance and other unknown envelope shapes which will be another thing completely, all basing on the weird different envelopes you can set.  Those high resonance resonant filter harmonic frequencies can be heard often when the Oscs are both down in the mix on the P5 or P10. 

There's no end of sounds you will get.