Hola. I hope that you are having a lovely autumn (well, spring for you in the southern hemisphere).
Currents & Nostalgia has gotten into its final phase before release, so as a developer I kind of dived back into Partials & Discrepancies to keep sane in parallel to doing practical work on the coming release.
Before going into the details of the new version, there has been a preset pack added to the Partials & Discrepancies product page that is not done by me.
They are made by a clever French fellow called Trajectoire, and there is also a link in that fold-out to more free presets by him for the synth.
It is cool to finally have something on the site that is not done by myself.
You can find it here, right under the change log:
https://www.unusable.net/synthesizers/partials-and-discrepancies/
Yeah, the change log…
Partials & Discrepancies v1.5.0
Yes, I changed the color theme a bit, but let’s go through that later…
While working on Currents & Nostalgia I have learned some new stuff and, yeah, I guess you can learn an old dog new tricks.
Some of the solutions were simple to port over to Partials & Discrepancies.
There are two things that might change the sound of older presets a bit:
- A more clever voice-stealing algorithm avoiding most of the clicks
- A tuned noise source when using Key Track and Noise on the mod osc. Turn off Key Track and it will sound like before.
So what has been added…
Oscillator Detune
The oscillator gets a clone, and both the original and the clone are offset in opposite directions.
On sounds where most partials are used it can be quite CPU hungry, but it also lets you keep the eight voices when you just want to fatten up the sound a bit.
The parameter is part of the slot system, so you can for example make sounds that get more detuned with velocity, use different detuning on each voice, or just make some sequenced weirdness.
Oscillator Smear
This was one of those slightly experimental ideas that turned out very simple.
Smear is basically a tuned delay line with a tiny bit of modulation.
It is fixed an octave below the oscillator, and the control only sets the level of the oscillator output going into it.
Tuned delay lines are common in physical modeling, and this setup is based on the classic Karplus-Strong idea.
It can generate some verby smearing, but also plucked-string sounds.
Personally I like using it on selected slots in a sequence, as you will see in a lot of the new presets.
Ring Modulator
The feature I have been using the least is the bit crusher.
It is useful in some patches, but often I just leave it out.
Well, now you can switch it to a ring modulator with its own oscillator.
It can be used static or key-tracked and adds a few more sound-shaping options before the sound hits the filter.
A New Filter
When I built this synth, I wanted a filter that did not have much character and could be used to polish the additive oscillator output a bit.
While working with Currents & Nostalgia, I kind of realized that self-oscillation is a nice thing…
So I added a switch and a new filter.
The old one is still the default, but is now called West, as it is an approximation of the state-variable filter in the SEM.
The new filter is called East. It has the same slopes and LP/BP modes as the other one, but is loosely based on an old clever Soviet filter design that uses the capacitance in a programmable op-amp instead of a capacitor for the filtering.
This filter self-oscillates, and if you have no modulation running and Key Track at 1.00, you can use Shift + scroll to get the control to lock to tuned intervals.
Mod Osc v2
For the mod osc, I already mentioned the key-tracked noise.
There is also a Sync button that turns the mod osc into a host-clocked LFO.
And there is a KBD-RST button that resets the phase of the mod osc on key strikes.
This can, for example, be used with Sample & Hold at the slowest rate to generate random filter cutoff settings on each key strike.
Glide me to the moon
I added portamento glide and legato from the coming synth.
The legato also works polyphonically, so key strikes while other notes are held get a glide from the closest held note.
If no notes are held, there is no glide.
A New Look
P&D’s original red theme was an attempt to keep it simple, but different from Curves & Membranes.
The color and lack of contrast have been the main complaints from users.
And to be sincere, the complaints will likely still come, as the interface is still dark and works best on Apple displays with their high contrast…
The idea was to use a dark grayish blue to get more contrast and a bit more refinement to the look.
I have also moved some controls together where it made better sense.
All oscillator-slot controls are now at the bottom, with the harmonic three still on the left, the disharmonic ones still on the right, and the controls added after the initial release in the middle.
The knobs for functions in the signal path have red tracks. The other knobs are either dark blue or black.
I also changed the wording on the partial-spectrum buttons from Wave to Spectra.
42 new factory presets
To kind of showcase the new functionality I have made 42 new presets.
42 is a nice number, but it also makes the preset browser a bit of a scroll infinity, so they are added to a new bank called v150-Factory.
That way you can click the three-dots button and filter on only those.
All in all, I think these new features make the synth a lot more capable without making it more complex, and it covers a wider range of those digital sounds that can sound broken and emotional or very clean.
There is a no-talking video of me playing through around 30 of the new presets, with the sound fully dry and some of the updates shown on screen:
Currents & Nostalgia dev log
The synth got its final feature earlier this week: an addition to the waveform mixer, adding Min/Max combinations of both saw and sine.
It is fun to use when the oscillators are in different ranges or when one oscillator is on a fixed frequency.
(And yes Oskar, you pushed me to add it.)
All in all I am very satisfied with the synth now.
While the architecture is quite common, the slot sequencers give it some sound options that would be nearly impossible on other synths.
And it looks like it will have around 300 presets on release, showing quite a big variation.
The latest video with dry presets can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTNADS8kqtA
Regarding the release, I have decided to make it available a few days before the official release from the account page.
How that will work, when the release is and what the price will be are still not decided.
But it is in two or three weeks, and I will send a new mail about it.
I think that’s it for now.
Remember to grab Trajectoire’s two preset banks for Partials & Discrepancies.
Sayonara,
Rasmus Nyåker,
Head of everything Unusable