List(!!!!) of synths with per-voice (polyphonic) distortion

[WasteLand]

Not to toot my own horn, but Newfangled Audio Generate has polyphonic distortion.

(Whoops, just noticed it was already mentioned)

why not, toot your own horn, be proud! (modesty isn't a virtue in my world.. arrogance is something else).

yes generate has a great MPE, didnt bought it (yet). do have pendulate..

[JO512]

I was just about to make a new topic asking which synths have per-voice distortion!

Another to add to the list is Kontakt.

[biscuitdough]

Fathom has a distortion section in some of the oscillators, maybe even all of them. I can't recall because there's some I don't use.

[JO512]

Does it prevent the ugly mess distortion tends to cause when playing chords?

As someone already answered, yes. But distorting a chord doesn't always make an ugly mess! It depends on the intervals, the amount and kind of distortion, and your taste. Complex chords generally don't work well with lots of distortion. Things get pretty messy. But simple dyads especially sound very interesting when distorted. Perfect fifths, when distorted, sound amazing! This is the essential sound of heavy metal and much rock. But applying distortion to each voice separately definitely completely avoids the "mess" that distorting chords creates.

When you add distortion or saturation, you are generally clipping the waveform or otherwise making sharper bends in it. This adds overtones. Think of the waveform as a curve that is bending or turning. Higher frequencies amount to sharper bends in that curve. If you take a curve with gentle bends, like a low-frequency sine wave, and you clip it, this creates those sharp "shoulders" on the wave crests and troughs. These sharp bends necessarily create higher frequencies. But they are not constant. You hear a brief high-frequency burst with every one of those sharp turns. Imagine that the waveform is a road you are driving on at a constant speed. Driving on a low-frequency sine wave produces little acceleration and is a pretty easy experience. But imagine if you are forced, at that same speed, to suddenly turn a right-angle every so often, as when you drive along a square wave. Each sharp turn will produce a hard jolt. This is similar to what your speaker is doing. The waveform describes how your speaker is being forced to move. These sharp bends amount to very sudden changes in speed, hard starts or stops.

Set up a synth to generate a simple sine wave at a very low frequency. Then clip it hard, essentially turning it into a square wave. Now place a high-pass filter after it to remove the low frequencies. In the result, you'll hear a series of pops, each of which comes from one of those sharp turns in the distorted wave. This is also why saw waves sound buzzy, because of the series of high frequency bursts you hear as the sharp points of the saw go by.

Now imagine taking two sine waves of different frequencies and clipping them before mixing. You'll get a certain kind of resulting waveform. Then try mixing them before clipping them. This will produce a different resulting waveform, because now, you are clipping the interference pattern instead of the isolated sine waves. It clips differently. That interference pattern has "beats" in it. Among other things, where the amplitude is high, it will clip more. The pattern of sharp turns in the resulting waveform will be different. You can hear this clearly if you play a chord with low-frequency sines and then clip it hard and then high-pass filter it. Try playing a dyad this way with a close interval, like a minor second.

I encourage some experiments here, clipping isolated sines and mixed sines and listening while also looking at an oscilloscope visualization of the resulting waveform.

You can do a lot of interesting things with your sound by saturating to various degrees before and after mixing signals.

Distortion, if you know how and where to use it, is a wonderful tool! Having the option to place it wherever you want in the signal chain is very useful! I wish all synths had the option!

I really wish Diva had per-voice distortion! I love that feature in Repro-5! I recently almost sold Repro to thin my plugin collection and this feature is the main reason I kept it!

[The Nerdy Music Guy]

Surge has a polyphonic waveshaper with flexible routing per Scene, if that counts.

[JO512]

Some of the warp modes in a synth like Serum could be thought of as a kind of per-voice distortion, which add overtones.

[Rastkovic]

Interesting question.

I guess Waldorf Largo has polyphonic distortion, but I'm not 110% sure......

[e-crooner]

Does it prevent the ugly mess distortion tends to cause when playing chords?

As someone already answered, yes.
...
...
...
I really wish Diva had per-voice distortion! I love that feature in Repro-5! I recently almost sold Repro to thin my plugin collection and this feature is the main reason I kept it!

Thank you for all the time you took to write that long reply

I think Repro-5 is superior to Diva in every way, not just regarding the distortion unit.

[Dencheg]

I think Repro-5 is superior to Diva in every way, not just regarding the distortion unit.

I'm not sure it's true. Some people prefer Rubik's Cube to the most beautiful (but single) color

[e-crooner]

I think Repro-5 is superior to Diva in every way, not just regarding the distortion unit.

I'm not sure it's true. Some people prefer Rubik's Cube to the most beautiful (but single) color

Well, IF I were to use such a limited synth at all, I would pay most attention to the sound quality, and in that respect Repro-5 sounds superior to me, especially the effects.

[AnX]

is it me, or are a lot of ppl getting confused here?

per voice distortion.... a voice in this case is a single note, when a note is pressed, a voice (card) is activated....


someone mentioned Dune3, and dist in filter fx... Well, that's on each layer, and the layers don't dictate how many voices are used. You can set it to 16 note poly on a single layer, but each note doesn't have its own distortion

what am I missing here?

[JO512]

is it me, or are a lot of ppl getting confused here?

per voice distortion.... a voice in this case is a single note, when a note is pressed, a voice (card) is activated....


someone mentioned Dune3, and dist in filter fx... Well, that's on each layer, and the layers don't dictate how many voices are used. You can set it to 16 note poly on a single layer, but each note doesn't have its own distortion

what am I missing here?

I don't know anything about Dune and so can't say whether Dune has this feature or not. But the effect is different if you apply distortion to each note of a chord separately, before mixing the notes, than if you apply it after mixing them. Some synths allow you to apply distortion to each note separately prior to mixing. Repro-5 and Falcon are a couple of example of synths that offer this. If, in Dune, you are applying distortion to a layer containing a mix of notes or voices rather than to an individual note or voice, then this is not the feature this thread is about. Can any Dune users confirm one way or the other?

If you have Repro-5, try cranking the distortion. Notice that it changes the timbre of the sound, adding overtones, making the sound sharper and more cutting, but that chords don't sound dirty, messy, or muddy. Then try turning off that distortion and applying a separate distortion plugin after Repro-5 (turn off delay and reverb in Repro-5). Then try playing some chords. Now you are distorting the interference pattern of the mixed voices rather than the individual voices. This strongly accentuates the beating that results from mixing notes. With complex chords, you'll now get a very noisy, muddy, dirty, messy sound.

Personally, I like the sound of distortion applied after mixing a chord if it is there to the right degree and the right kind of chord is used. A simple perfect fifth dyad always sounds great even with lots of distortion, but add a minor third and things get rather messy. Such sounds can be right in some kinds of music though.

If you can apply distortion to each voice prior to mixing the voices, this allows you to shape the timbre with distortion without affecting the way chord tones interact. You can always add more distortion after the mixing of the voices if you want to accentuate the beating between the notes. It is nice to have both options. It is also nice to be able to add distortion before or after a filter. This is one clear advantage of more complex synths like Falcon. You can place effects pretty much anywhere in the signal chain, which gives you lots more control over the sound.

Being able to place distortion before or after the VCA for each voice is useful too. If, for example, you just have a simple sine oscillator and you push it into a clipper or waveshaper, the amount of the effect is different with different signal amplitudes. Louder signals clip more and so will have more overtones. So if your VCA is being modulated by velocity and you put the distortion after the VCA, you will get sharper, brighter, more aggressive tones when you strike the keys with higher velocities, making the sound more dynamic, whereas if you put the distortion before the VCA, you will not have this same variation in timbre. As Urs pointed out about Repro-5, the distortion comes after the VCA, which makes it dynamic, which is nice.

You could think of distortion here as a kind of synthesis technique. Normally, in subtractive synthesis, you have all your higher overtones in the original oscillator waveform, with a saw or square, and then you remove them to varying degrees with a filter (putting aside distortion from high resonance). With distortion, on the other hand, you add overtones. With a pure sine wave, there are no overtones, and filtering won't change the timbre (except with distortion from strongly boosting and clipping the signal when the resonance peak is close to the sine frequency). But if you add distortion to a pure sine, you add lots of overtones. What overtones are added depends on how you distort it. Asymmetric waveshaping will add a mix of even and odd harmonics, while symmetric waveshaping will only produce odd harmonics. With distortion, you can turn a basic sine wave into a very rich, bright tone and make the timbre very dynamic by varying the level of the distortion by placing it after a VCA, such that when you play softly, you get a soft, smooth tone, and when you play aggressively, you get a sharp, bright, aggressive tone. This is similar to many physical instruments, including the human voice.

If what you are trying to do is to shape the basic timbre of the sound using distortion, using it as a synthesis technique, and you don't want the messiness of what distortion does to a chord, you need control over where the distortion happens in the signal chain. Few synths really allow adequate control over this, unfortunately.

[JO512]

Of course, with a wavetable synth that allows you to make your own wavetables, like Serum, you can accomplish much the same thing as I described above by making a wavetable that morphs from a simple sine at one end to a square or saw at the other, or some other shape, and then use velocity and/or an envelope generator, or perhaps aftertouch or pedal, to control wavetable position and maybe also volume, yielding a very dynamic and expressive instrument. It might be argued that a wavetable synth like this gives you the most control of all in this respect, since you can do many things with the wavetable other than just a simple clipping or waveshaping or wavefolding function.

[AnX]

is it me, or are a lot of ppl getting confused here?

per voice distortion.... a voice in this case is a single note, when a note is pressed, a voice (card) is activated....


someone mentioned Dune3, and dist in filter fx... Well, that's on each layer, and the layers don't dictate how many voices are used. You can set it to 16 note poly on a single layer, but each note doesn't have its own distortion

what am I missing here?

I don't know anything about Dune and so can't say whether Dune has this feature or not. But the effect is different if you apply distortion to each note of a chord separately, before mixing the notes, than if you apply it after mixing them. Some synths allow you to apply distortion to each note separately prior to mixing. Repro-5 and Falcon are a couple of example of synths that offer this. If, in Dune, you are applying distortion to a layer containing a mix of notes or voices rather than to an individual note or voice, then this is not the feature this thread is about. Can any Dune users confirm one way or the other?

well, I am a Dune user, and it def doesn't have per note distortion, that's why I was asked if ppl were getting confused, or if I got the wrong end of the stick about the technical details of the question

[Dencheg]

well, I am a Dune user, and it def doesn't have per note distortion, that's why I was asked if ppl were getting confused, or if I got the wrong end of the stick about the technical details of the question

It does. The insert effect is placed next to filter on the UI, but in fact it's a per-voice insert.
I can confirm (subjectively), that distortion via this insert sounds like per-voice distortion (to me), cause chords don't get messy