A.C.E. appreciation thread

[MitchK1989]

Just booted up A.C.E. for the first time in a while and just thought I'd make a post about how great it is since I don't see ACE discussed here much - especially when combining sync, crossmod, and the circuit bend functions on the tweaks page it can get downright evil sounding in a great way really fast.

I bought it when it was new and remember it being pretty hard on CPU but a gorgeous synth, obviously in 2021 the cpu usage is much much less of an issue for me (it uses less cpu than diva 99% of the time I'd say, at least the way I use it)

some absolutely gorgeous pads can be attained by pushing crosstalk almost to the point of the patch "breaking up" and then backing off just a hair as well.

obviously I don't have access to u-he's sales numbers but I just wanted to make sure people weren't sleeping on ACE (or Bazille for that matter) when all I see people talking about are Z3, hive, and diva. also if you are afraid of cables you can still make some really gorgeous patches in ACE with 0-3 of them rather than the big plate of spaghetti that appears whenever I do 4 op fm in bazille.

[killmaster]

I, for one, really appreciate your post. You have single postedly rejuvenated my interest. Sharing ideas like this is invaluable!

[MitchK1989]

another interesting thing I was playing with this morning - you can use ACE's LFOs as FM operators really easily (just patch LFO2 into LFO1's pm input and set both LFO tuning modes to semitones - ADSR2 is even pre-patched to control LFO 2 level for mod depth) - either use a sine on LFO 2 and the multiply tuning modifier or use tap map on LFO2 and the "spectralize" shapes function on the tapmap to use an additive osc of sorts as your modulator to fake having more than 2 operators (with one shared mod depth envelope though)

[martinjuenke]

Even the default patch sounds gorgeous!
It actually lives and is breathing.
So impressing, this synth!

[MitchK1989]

I actually asked for a grungy lo fi FM osc in Diva 2 to do some hybrid tones with FM into analog modelled filters (looking for something more dirty with like the MS-20 filters or similar rather than the warm and beautiful tones I get out of bazille most times) and it turns out I can actually do a lot of that kinda stuff in ACE as long as I use the LFOs as my sound source instead of VCOs (and can use VCO 1 in sync mode set to triangle to still get an LFO in those patches)

edit: cross talk does not really work in a great way while using the LFOs as FM oscs (it makes the VCOs bleed into the filter somehow) so that one parameter should probably be left at zero unless you view tonality and signal flow as more "suggestions" than rules