The long DIVA thread

[ford442]

anyone know what's gonna come next ?
personally i'd love something of the curtis CEM family.
the pro one would be a great example as it has CEM chips for oscillator/filter/envelope.
anyway as long as it's something based on the CEM3340 i'm happy.
CEM3340 vco + CEM3310 EG + CEM3320 vcf would be the dream combo.


also i'd like to see the polivoks modelled, and that should cater for those asking for more "drive"

my guess is that we'll hear more about Bazille and ACE XL next..

[fceramic]

Processing Diva through Ohmicide is fantastic. Really brings out the alot of the details and adds air and smoothness to the sound (of course that depends on which one of the gazillion algorithms you choose).
It might be a good idea to add some sort of distortion/overdrive unit to the effects section. Something that makes Diva sound more dirty and noisy. Something as simple as Schwa's Drive device would be a great addition -> just input, drive and feedback + a brickwall limiter switch.

[justin3am]

I like using the drive on the rotary speaker effect. With some clever programming, you can get rid of most of the modulation, so you can just play with the drive and output. It sounds very nice.

[Epitaph64]

This synth is simply astounding. I've never purchased a VSTi before, but I've been in the market for one that I'd be willing to learn inside and out, and I think this may be the one. I've really enjoyed working with Charlatan and this synth has a similar workstyle to that, but in a much more sophisticated manner.

[Mogular]

The Sallen-Key is the opposite to the rest and sounds best to my ears with oscillators around 10-15% (can't imagine ever wanting over 25% for any purpose whatsoever).

This is a revelation, I had no idea that the volume of the oscillators was actually contributing to the filter drive in such a dramatic way.
MS20 oscillators at 25% produces all sorts of whistless and swoops from the filters that are completely lost when the oscillators are up full. Works well with the Moog ones as well.

[Epitaph64]

The Sallen-Key is the opposite to the rest and sounds best to my ears with oscillators around 10-15% (can't imagine ever wanting over 25% for any purpose whatsoever).

This is a revelation, I had no idea that the volume of the oscillators was actually contributing to the filter drive in such a dramatic way.
MS20 oscillators at 25% produces all sorts of whistless and swoops from the filters that are completely lost when the oscillators are up full. Works well with the Moog ones as well.

Woah, I've been keeping them between 70 and 100%... Time to go back to my experimentation

[justin3am]

It makes sense when you consider a synths signal flow in terms of a mixing console. A synth's mixer only has so much head room, so cranking up the volume of all the oscillators results in eating up that head room, overdriving the summing amp and eventually overdriving the next component of the signal chain. Working with hardware modular synths has given me new appreciation for how different levels effect the behavior of various components in the signal chain.

Also consider that feedback and filter resonance (a type of feedback) require headroom to do their jobs. If all the headroom is already used up by the output of the oscillators, it reduces the potential for the feedback and resonance to shape a sound.

[jipumarino]

Do ACE/BM users need this? - Nope, not really. Do Zebra users need this? Nope, not really. Diva will be a subset. Merely a beginners synth. A small little gem with hopefully a lot of personality!

So, is this still true in terms of sound? Can Zebra or ACE sound like those emulated circuits that DIVA has?

Thanks!
A happy ACE owner

[Mogular]

I think Urs was referring specifically to 'need'. A completely qualitative discussion.
At this point in time Diva is producing sounds that neither Ace nor Zebra can nail in the same way.

[taoyoyo]

So basically if it's less noisy than the original that's a fault in my book.

Well, it wouldn't be a completely accurate emulation, I'll give you that.

But I'm with those that feel that a high noise floor is one of the less desirable aspects of these old synths (along with price, reliability, polyphony, lack of patch memory...etc.).

I would really like it if Urs could add a function where at some really inconvenient point Diva lost all of her presets... you know, just for the realism angle.

(I loved my 106 but after a few years the repair bills just got old)

[olja]

Also got the demo, really nice sounds! The only things I wish for is more irregularity, noise and weirdness.. I don't know exactly but maybe put all kinds of "destructive behaviour" into a module to really simulate the analogue feel. As others have mentioned, I love what Olga and Oligarc does, there's a kind of unpredictive behaviour in those which could be used in really creative ways. Some controls that could alter the algorithms in intelligent ways to inject disorder, from very subtle to chaotic. Of course I have no idea how this would be done or if it's possible, I just like the idea of a dedicated module to 'f**k things up'. Also some kind of preset randomization.. I find that the synths that have this are the ones I return to most, not only beacuse I'm a not very skilled programmer, but because I love being surprised by sounds, and the feeling of tweaking something that came out of nowhere, into my own taste.

[mcnoone]

Just pre-ordered this.
Diva...I like this one.
I will be sure to make many a short release time sounds with it.

[xh3rv]

some kind of preset randomization..

The u-he product randomizer works with Diva - http://www.u-he.com/PatchLib/presets/al ... omizer.zip

There's that thought experiment about how many monkeys randomly typing would take how much time to reproduce Shakespeare, but isn't it sometimes deeply poetic and meaningful in the human condition to say " afpoieur3289nfak jzcj #jak0c"?

[karrikuh]

Hehehe. Our DCO *is* a divide down oscillator with a master clock. So the frequencies are quantised. Our master clock runs at 4 MHz, so the finest resolution is a minuscle fraction of a cent, at any frequency.

There is no phase lock in a Juno 60. If you hold an octave, there's a slow but distinct beating. I can post an example if you want

No need for a proof, I believe you, thanks . It's just against my understanding of divide down technology why two voices derived from a common master clock and spaced e.g. one octave apart would not have a perfect integer ratio of frequencies, so no beating. The only reason I could see for this not to be is some kind of bug in the microcontroller which determines the clock divider factors. I found two sources explaining the Juno DCO to some degree

http://www.electricdruid.net/index.php? ... o.junodcos
http://sequence15.blogspot.com/2008/02/ ... rcuit.html

The author of the second article observes a a varying phase offset between unison voices for consecutive notes played, but can only guess how this is possible. So as goes for the Juno DCO, there seems to be a large overall gap between theory and practice...

[mystran]

Hehehe. Our DCO *is* a divide down oscillator with a master clock. So the frequencies are quantised. Our master clock runs at 4 MHz, so the finest resolution is a minuscle fraction of a cent, at any frequency.

There is no phase lock in a Juno 60. If you hold an octave, there's a slow but distinct beating. I can post an example if you want

No need for a proof, I believe you, thanks . It's just against my understanding of divide down technology why two voices derived from a common master clock and spaced e.g. one octave apart would not have a perfect integer ratio of frequencies, so no beating. The only reason I could see for this not to be is some kind of bug in the microcontroller which determines the clock divider factors. I found two sources explaining the Juno DCO to some degree

If you divide frequencies from a master clock using separate counters, you only get perfect octaves if the counter value of the lower note is divisible by two. If it's not, then the counter value of the higher note will need to be rounded to the closest integer (eg lower note being 13 cycles, the octave up would be 6.5 but rounds down to 6).