Why hello there KVR. I know I am not a heavy poster here, but thought this should interest some folks here.

The track is a bit of a retro epic piece if that makes any sense. It utilizes a single synthesizer for the entire track, and that would be one of my favorite soft synths ever, Poly-Ana.

http://soundcloud.com/apzx/amalgamize-apzx

The FLAC can also be downloaded from SoundCloud because well SoundCloud does kind of butcher the sound quality a little bit.

That's amazing Austin! Very J.M.J.-esque in parts. Love it! And always super impressed when I hear a piece that's 100% Poly-Ana. Wow! I built that?

Good synth sounds on here, and the track does not appear to be any poorer for a scarcity of chords. Nice work.

AQ,
Well, when I have had to describe what Poly-Ana really is. I almost always fall back on the notion that Poly-Ana is almost Semi modular in nature. It has an incredible breadth and scope to it. It takes FX incredibly well and just sounds awesome.

Seismic,
Thanks! I think you would be surprised at the amount of chords in the track. I wrote three 8 bar motifs with differing chordal qualities. There are some repeats, but what I found was that by simply changing the way I used the leads completely changed the way the track felt. So, instead of 3 repeating motifs there are considerably more melodic lines.

Also, I decided to experiment with 7th chords in this and found that they never resolve to anything until you play a normal Major or Minor chord. Of course stringing a few of those together is not really a problem at all.

Big influences on Poly-Ana were the Jupiter8/6/MKS-80 sound. And the Ensoniq ESQ-1 voice architecture. (Which is actually bigger than Poly-Ana in a few ways. 4 Envs vs. Poly's 3. 3 LFOs where Poly only has 2.)

So really, it's just a "dream analog", a little bit bigger than would have been practical in real life. And yes, matrix routing goes a long way towards making it as powerful as a modular. As long as you know you want to go osc->filt->amp then you don't really need a true modular. And 99% of the time, that's how you want the signal to route. The two modulation mixers also make the impossible possible, particularly the multiply (ring modulation) functions in addition to the obvious add (mix). Two independent sample-and-holds with choices of 3 clock sources, plus the two Lag filters that can be used to smooth out hard edges in your modulation envelopes; allow for a lot of complexity. (Speaking of which, not enough people are using Poly-AnaFX, which is capable of all kinds of envelope following effects, among a million other things. If you haven't yet, try it!)

Poly-Ana's other secret weapon is incorporating stereo right into the voice. With two filters that can be panned anywhere you like (usually hard L + R, but not necessarily). And it offers a nice trade-off in that you can choose to patch them in parallel if you wish, losing the stereo. (Though you can still pan the voice at the Amp stage. Even better, you can modulate the pans, even at audio-rates!)

The other really important thing was to make her PLAYABLE. So many soft-synths come full of impressive but BIG sounds, that aren't really designed to be played. Poly's presets were meant to show off the playability of the instrument. I know this works because I get caught up in playing her when I should be working, some of those sounds just suck you in and make you want to play!

Again, very impressive stuff APZX!!! It really shows off all of these qualities.

Impressive. I like the quality of sounds in this track, Poly-Ana is a beast of a synth. I enjoyed this composition for the epic/dramatic feel but it has changes of atmosphere as well.
Very nice, a keeper

Cheers