Prophet VS sounds with Zebra?

[Arrested Developer]

Hello,
one of the hardware synths that i miss very much in the softsynth-world is the Prophet VS.
(there is a softsynth that pretends to emulate it, but it doesn't convince me...)

What i specially like about the Prophet VS is that somehow "smoky" sound, which is hard to put in words.
I could also say that it sounds "indirect" in a very noble way.
My instinct tells me that with Zebra it should be possible to approach this charisma.
There is also a set of waveforms in the patch lib ("Waves of plenty") which contains a really good starting point.
But I couldn't find so far the right filter settings to evoke the whole magic.

Has anyone some hints or experiences which could help me
(choice of the appropriate filters, setting of cutoff and resonance, further modules) ?

[mcnoone]

Could you post some audio clips of some VS sounds you would like to hear Zebra do?

[Arrested Developer]

Hi Michael,
I found some youtube videos that capture some of the aspects i mean:

in this first video, see around:

0:55 -> typical how the filters shape the sound
3:20 -> focus on the "body" of the sound; its presence without beeing "hi-fi"



in this second video, see:

0:15 & 1:20 -> rawness of waveform in combination with filters
1:50 & 3:50 -> plasticity of filters (specially in the mellow regions)




in this third video, see specially the strings in the background,
e.g. between 1:30 - 2:20

(the whole track gives a good impression about the plasticity of these sounds in mixes.)




(I hope this can give an idea of what i mean...it's really hard to put sound-characteristics to words,
specially when it's about nuances...

Thanks!

[hollo]

Thanks for the clip collection Arrested Developer

I like also that foggy, smooth, thin, glassy sound what a VS can give,
and i was experimenting a lot to solve the VS mystery sound.

I get finally 3 or 4 preset,

Light-hearted Prophet: it's free (in my sig) It's a warm voicy sq-triang pad, you can try it also with with Modwheel and Pich Bend together.

The others are (i dont want to push it on you )but actually 3 of them in the Padsheaven bank:

Vs StringsPad: - PB is balancing between Saw and SquarePads and the Mw softening to that "smoky" sound.

Vs Light-Blade: -Soft str or Bright glassy synth via Mw.

Sweeping GlassStrings: -as i tried the different Vs sounds i'v got this "HiFi Zebra" version.

[Fritze]

Oh yes, the start of the first video brought instant memories. The VS does some cool sounds and has an interesting character. I Like it.

[jupiter8]

I believe the following could be a problem when trying to recreate the VS with Zebra.

Keep in mind that none of us had any background in DSP or psychoacoustics; we had to
make it all up from scratch. As it turns out, some of our ignorance paid off in taking paths
that textbooks would told us to avoid.

Tony and I theorized on how to do a wavetable synth, and came up with two strategies - have a
waveform of short, fixed length and vary how fast you played it, or start with a very long
version of a waveform and skip samples in it to alter how long it took you to read it out once
(and therfore alter your final pitch). Unable to decide we acquired a PPG anda Korg DW6000 to
see how they did it. We felt vindicated to learn that the PPG did it exactly the first way we
theorized, and the Korg the second. (In the process, Josh became one of the few people in the
US who knew how a PPG worked inside - the company didn't release schematics, advising would-be
techs to "Don't loose (sic) time - return to factory immediately!"). We liked the pure balls
of the PPG better (plus the scheme that used shorter waveforms meant we could stuff more waves
into the instrument), so we chose the transposition method.

This choice is the one place our ignorance paid off the most. Transposing a
waveform way down in pitch causes strange upper harmonics - images of the
original harmonic pattern - to appear if not properly filtered. These images are what gives
the PPG (and VS) its brightness and vicious bass. I
was raving for months (much to the bafflement of Josh and Tony) in particular about the sound
a PPG makes where only the low and highest harmonics seem to be present. One day, I walked into
the lab while Josh was
testing the VS hardware, and happily exclaimed "That's it! That's it!! That's the sound I mean!
What's the waveform?" It turned out it was only a
sine wave, but it was tuned so low that the image of its one harmonic was
audible as a very high, airy harmonic.

From The birth of the Prophet VS
http://www.vintagesynth.com/sci/birth.txt

[hollo]

Very interesting read, thanks Jupiter8!

This must be one of the reason for that misterious sound.

When some remarkable new things happening it's very usual to
have some exident factor. I think anyone who made something big, could also tell us about.

Things always happening, it's up on the creative, flexible mind to use it as a virtue, or take it as bed omen, stopping the process and crying under the ruins of creative flow.

Good thing we can choose.

[Arrested Developer]

@hollo: the padsheaven soundset is anyway on my to-buy-list ...

@jupiter8: thanks a lot for this quote...
It would be interesting if there are any strategies to simulate such a behaviour inside Zebra?

Anyhow, what i found difficult by now is to find the appropriate filter module.

[Vectorman]

I had done a half-decent replica of the "Stewkey" patch from the VS factory presets with Zebra, but it's on my older recording PC, which I haven't unpacked yet since moving. Playing with the "waves of plenty" wavetables, I'd done a few sweeping things, one of which was vaguely in the ballpark of the "Volkanik" preset.

As jupiter noted, though, Zebra is always going to have a somewhat different character. I've thought a time or two that it would be interesting if Zebra's wavetable oscillators had a "lo-fi" mode that used a primitive (and therefore artifact-ridden) pitch transposition scheme so as to get a grungier sound akin to early hybrid synths like the Prophet VS and PPG.

[Spitfire31]

The best (?) way to get a proper VS sound, I think, would be to persuade Josh Jeffe (one of the Sequential pioneers behind the VS) to revive the Vector Sector softsynth so that it works on Intel processors.

I'm holding on to a Mac G5 for the sole purpose of not losing Vector Sector. I think that it captures that 'smoky' and at the same time digitally rude character of the VS in a way that the 'other softsynth' can't even approach.

/Joachim

EDIT: But perhaps it would be more realistic to try to persuade Urs to go along with Vectorman's idea of a primitive transposition scheme…

[hollo]

@hollo: the padsheaven soundset is anyway on my to-buy-list ...

@jupiter8: thanks a lot for this quote...
It would be interesting if there are any strategies to simulate such a behaviour inside Zebra?

Anyhow, what i found difficult by now is to find the appropriate filter module.

Hehe, i forget that 3 of the presets i was talking about it's
already in the free demo patches. I'm sooo generous
- Nobody was complaining about, looks like no one downloaded the freebie set.

I don't say they are emulated, - i never had a VS, but as i remember the Vs sound, they'r close, and fitting very well in the whole soundset.

So there is
"Light-hearted Prophet",
"Vs StringsPad", and also
"Sweeping GlassStrings".

Load the last one and you can find stepped waveforms,
simulating the lower 8/12 bit.
/Adventure Kid's waveset 11 and 12. Also free in the Zebra patchlib./

You can browse all 16 of them, maybe turn off
the EQ's, and solo one osc, or drag it to an empty line to listen. Swich single, dual or quad with suitable detune. Even the sinus kind have some nice noise in it.

I found the XMF (LP4 Analog) to the most related filter.
LP Vintage2 also good, and for this nice sweep, i was using
BP QBand, which is not so often used, but perfect for this slow animation.

Cheers,
Joseph

[News From The Sky]

I would be in heaven (and would pay $$$) if Urs would put the Prophet VS into Diva. Not just the wavetable scanning and aliasing, but the vector envelope too.

Perhaps as an option on the "Sequential" model, which would also offer both SSM and CEM filters...

[Spitfire31]

I would be in heaven (and would pay $$$) if Urs would put the Prophet VS into Diva.

Or in Zebra 3? Agreed! It would hopefully be less $$$ than a used VS rack for 2500+ bucks - if you can find it and in a reasonable shape, at that…

/Joachim

[Arrested Developer]

@vectorman: it would be great, if you could share the stewkeys

I've been trying out to simulate a "bad transposition" mode of the wavetables via an "abused" FM-module that goes back into the filter. I think it could offer some good results although it seems tricky to find good values for the KeyScale of the FMO and the Mix-Level of this nonharmonic "dirt-component"...


But I agree that it would be great if the behaviour of transposition (as used in the VS and - as i learned - the PPG) could be integreated in a future version of Zebra.
(I think that Zebra is maybe the more accurate platform for VS-like sounds than DIVA because of its "open" waveform-structure...)[/img]

[News From The Sky]

Yeah, Zebra 3 makes more sense, especially since it will also have Diva-derived filters.

I'd love for Zebra's wavescanning and vector-ish capabilities to be expanded and deepened, so that it could do everything the VS, Wavestation, and PPG/Microwave could do, but taken even further.