KVR Audio

GruvSyco · Post by **GruvSyco** » Mon May 02, 2005 2:26 am

The presets on this are incredible.

The Chase · Post by **The Chase** » Mon May 02, 2005 2:32 am

FaX wrote:Ummm why would one even want 16 Osc's in a monosynth ........... ?

I'm gonna make a 17 osc synth just for you

landstrum77 · Post by **landstrum77** » Mon May 02, 2005 2:52 am

nice job on this one-patch 13 sends me into robert hood heaven-thxx!

Z3R0T0N1N · Post by **Z3R0T0N1N** » Mon May 02, 2005 3:33 am

@fax - many hardware synths have 16; in fact pretty much any 8 voice MT, 2 osc will have, with layering that's up to sixteen. it's not at all unusual in hardware. superwave performer has 14.

hesnotthemessiah · Post by **hesnotthemessiah** » Mon May 02, 2005 6:23 am

Just downloaded Pterosaur about 20 minutes a go and given it a spin in Cubase. My first impression after having a listen to the first 15 presets was that it was a nice sounding synth and could be useful for the type of stuff I do, but wasn't really anything too different to anything I had tried previously. I got to Patch 15 and thought I would have a go at editing this patch - that's when I realised it's potential! What really makes this synth stand out is the way the 2 LFOs plus the Mod dial on each Group, can really transform the sound. After spending the next 10 minutes tweaking patch 15 I came up with a (in my opinion at least

) great lead sound that is very inspiring.

I think the balance of options and number of controls is just right as it is very intuitive and fun to use. Now I am going to contradict this last sentence by offering the following as possible updates

:-

Possible new features?
1)Way of applying one LFO onto another - perhaps one more dial which would control the degree of one LFOs signal onto the other LFO and a switch to select LFO1 onto LFO2 or vica versa.
2)Midi control for everything (MIDI Learn?).
3)Lfo assignable to Echo level and each OSC Tune and Pan.
4)Echo OFF and Group OFF option to reduce CPU.
5)Rotary/Linear dial options (Find the rotary dials about awkward myself).
6)Polyphonic option (with number of notes option).

2+3 are pretty much covered by EnergyXT

(plug, plug, plug

) which I always use as a VSTi to host my VST stuff in Cubase.

Thanks for this great synth - I would definately pay (upto about £15 or so) for Pterosaur as it is now.

ouroboros · Post by **ouroboros** » Mon May 02, 2005 6:39 am

This is really fabulous, thanks. sounds great.

FaX · Post by **FaX** » Mon May 02, 2005 7:13 am

justified wrote:
FaX wrote:Ummm why would one even want 16 Osc's in a monosynth ........... ?
Why would one even want 16 Osc's in a polysynth then?

I wouldn't expect 16 oscillators in a single patch on a poly synth either - how many polysynths actually stack that many oscillators by the way hmmmmmmm

?

Talk about frequency overkill .

FaX · Post by **FaX** » Mon May 02, 2005 7:23 am

spoonboiler wrote:@fax - many hardware synths have 16; in fact pretty much any 8 voice MT, 2 osc will have, with layering that's up to sixteen. it's not at all unusual in hardware. superwave performer has 14.

Layering patches in PCM based hardware and multi-oscillapors aren't the exactly same thing from a subtractive synthesis view point.

Ok then 4 partials to a patch .
Layer 4 voices and play an eight note chord.
How many voices does your $4000 uber synth have left to play - yeah I thought so

.
Talk about poor polyphony utilisation and in the case of a PC/Mac based virtual environment sloppy use of CPU resources.
And what else could you actually get to sit well in the mix next to that big sea of frequency mud ?

Sorry but synth's like the Nord / MS2000 even older SY77 and early monosynths etc all sounded perfectly fine without UBER oscillator stacking in a mix.

4 osc's to a patch with good mod-routing works damn fine and is pretty flexible.
And synth's like KUBIK etc dont count as they don't play layered oscillators on top of one another.
From what I gather Absynth has 3 oscillators per patch also and that's hardly a limitation either.

If you wan't it fine - it's not exactly a feature I desire myself.

Ronny Pries · Post by **Ronny Pries** » Mon May 02, 2005 8:00 am

wicked!

chris, could you implement a way to let the osc tunings learn from midi notes? i think that would be pretty cool to teach it some bigger chords without having to turn all those knobs

ronny

Hitchcock Bell · Post by **Hitchcock Bell** » Mon May 02, 2005 8:44 am

Thanks Chris b. I'm looking forward to trying the plug. I've been searching for a super-multi oscillator synth for a while.

The more oscillators the better I say.

For anyone else interested, the old EMS Synthi-100 mono synth had twelve oscillators and produced some unique, stunningly rich harmonic tones. The massive matrix patch board helped too of course!

Cheers
HB

chris_b · Post by **chris_b** » Mon May 02, 2005 1:12 pm

Thanks for the feedback everyone. (Especially the comments about the presets - it takes me ages to make presets)

hesnotthemessiah wrote:Possible new features?
1)Way of applying one LFO onto another - perhaps one more dial which would control the degree of one LFOs signal onto the other LFO and a switch to select LFO1 onto LFO2 or vica versa.

Shouldn't be a problem - although to keep it simple I'll probably hardwire it so you can only modify LFO2 with LFO1. Maybe two extra knobs: one which controls LFO1->LFO2.speed and the other which controls LFO1->LFO2.level

2)Midi control for everything (MIDI Learn?).

MIDI learn is not possible with standard Synthedit modules - I think there are some modules someone made which can do this, so maybe I'll look into it in the future. I can assign a MIDI control number to each knob, but don't most hosts take care of this sort of thing now?

3)Lfo assignable to Echo level and each OSC Tune and Pan.

LFO to echo level is a neat idea!
LFO to each OSC tune - not so neat from a CPU point of view (the reason I put the OSCs into the four groups was a compromise because of the CPU usage). I experimented with modulating the panning with LFOs but to be honest it didn't sound that good.

4)Echo OFF and Group OFF option to reduce CPU.

If you turn a group's volume and also its LFO controls down to zero it'll save some CPU. I can add an "OFF" option to the echo mode dropdown (I just tried this to make sure the echo actually stops using CPU - even with the feedback turned right down it takes a few seconds before it switches off so I wonder if there might be a denormal problem...)

5)Rotary/Linear dial options (Find the rotary dials about awkward myself).

Heh... I think I'm the only person who prefers the rotary controls (it makes fine tuning easy because if you move your mouse a long way from the knob you can make tiny angular increments) But I think even with linear respone you can hold CTRL or SHIFT for fine adjustments so I can easily change this when I release an updated version.

6)Polyphonic option (with number of notes option).

With SE it's not possible to make the number of polyphony voices user selectable - hopefully this feature will be added at some point. But anyway, sonically things could get a bit messy playing chords with this many oscillators per voice - maybe I'll release a poly version at some point with less OSCs

chris_b · Post by **chris_b** » Mon May 02, 2005 5:13 pm

I uploaded a slightly updated version - info is added to the first post in the thread.

FaX wrote:And what else could you actually get to sit well in the mix next to that big sea of frequency mud ?

did you even try the synth? or did you decide in your head that layering 16 oscillators probably wont sound good and then not even test your theory?

cptgone · Post by **cptgone** » Mon May 02, 2005 5:21 pm

thanks!

snooky · Post by **snooky** » Mon May 02, 2005 5:33 pm

gonna try it out!

bduffy · Post by **bduffy** » Mon May 02, 2005 5:38 pm

Man, this things is really smooth sounding, I don't care how many oscillators it has, it sounds awesome.

My instincts say, "keeper"! Thanks, Chris.

Pterosaur - new VSTi