Discussion about a Synth Voices discussion

(these are observations that wouldn’t be in line with the summary above…)

i might be wrong, but as far as i understand what @odevices had revealed:
the naming “custom unit” as well as the corresponding forum tag might not survive that major change.
and though magician Brian is famously prone to surprise his audience i am pretty positive “The Ultimate Sound Computer Taxonomy” won’t abandon the concept of ‘presets’.

I believe @iiii’s first sketch on the wiki already had that in mind. he/she/it also pointed clearly
out here and in the wiki that things might change…

i strongly disagree! i might tend to modular solutions in general. but i am also sure that in that
particular moment i would not have thought of any combination if you had not introduced those
two concurrent choices concerning forum vs. wiki. so please, get rid of that zip on your smiley :face_with_monocle:

i’d also find interesting to know what kind of synth voice is popular in the community. and why. So i wouldn’t mind a healthy competition on tastes. it’s just that a competition shouldn’t be a criteria
for letting contributions enter the repository. in fact i’d love to see a yearly competition inside
the ultimate synth voice discussion. i won’t need it to get going, but maybe others like this kind
of motivation. i’d also suggest to nominate and vote for a place in the “hall of fame of synth voices”
(rather than a place in the top 5 or top 10…)

2 Likes

I think we can agree on this being the main point. And if you or anyone else feels it might be fun to organize a competition in the synth voice thread on the forum that should be totally fine as well, since we decided on its “organic” nature. That competition will need it’s own rules anyway, and probably its own ‘discussion about a competition’ thread :grin: so let’s not decide about it right now.

Thanks for summarizing @mopoco!

2 Likes

Getting to use the pitfall syntax was a serious highlight in making that page…

4 Likes

Looks great, @iiii! Thanks!

Who here also thinks @mopoco should get a wiki account? :innocent:

5 Likes

alright, i get it. i am asking much and give so je-ne-sais-quoi…
when Joe asked me to ask for an account for the card one project
i had to say no due to the lack of and the unregularity of the time
I could spend on the wiki…the situation is still the same.

but when the great Wizard of Od asks you to join the order
you shall not reject the offer!

(I hope you know what you’re doing Brian :fearful: )

well then, bring up the

2 Likes

I definitely do not know what I’m doing. Jump first, scream later. :scream:

4 Likes

:mage:

:smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

:laughing:

1 Like

:smiley: :smiley:
i seriously love ya all guys!

1 Like

Exactly. I have nothing against contests. They can be inspiring. I just wouldn’t use any kind of popularity metric as a gating mechanism for getting a functional unit preset indexed in this proposed list on the wiki.

1 Like

same here

Spent some time on the couch chipping away.

8 Likes

Musical Instruments Subverting Categorization

:heart:

1 Like

thanks so much for chipping away @iiii !

i’m curious. in which category will we put synth voices that are based lightly or heavily on single cycle waveform samples? Synth or Sample based Voices? E.g. such as @Joe’s Sync Pad Unit:

i also love @iiii’s acronym “M.I.S.C.”!
and though i find @mudlogger’s Autogen301 presets to be fabulously exceptional in many ways
i would have expected to find them under the category of “Synth Voices”.
i guess my personal concept of voices, i.e. “Anything goes, as long as it is audible”, might be too wide to serve as a category that is generally understandable. but unless anybody else chimes in to push this aspect further (e.g. when @mudlogger would also prefer to find Autogen301 under Synth Voices)
i’d be perfectly fine with the current categorization! (just my 2 cents)

A big thankyou to everybody involved in the discussion and development of this archive, excellent voluntary work. And now that the location itemises more than just synth voices, we.have a central library of units.

1 Like

Some great work with the wiki that I was unaware of. If anything, when I first saw the categories they would probably be closer to Synth Voices if anything. But, honestly I have no real preference and easy either way.

2 Likes

Thanks for the encouragement everyone! Also, thanks for all of the feedback, I am totally open to any and all suggestions.

To be upfront, I haven’t had a chance to install many of the custom units yet and hence part of my impetus to contribute to the wiki. I figured since I was going to be mining through the custom-unit tag and then each of the threads to find the download links anyway, might as well make the results shareable with others. It’s been fun, there are so many of them that I’m excited to install!

I totally recognize that categorization is fundamentally arbitrary and therefore a personal expression. So, there will undoubtedly be mis-categorizations in the eyes of others. I claim no ownership, I am more than happy to defer to the community here.

And again, everyone is welcome to go in there and add and edit as they want.

This was a debate I was having myself. It could be that just having a single “Voice” category might make more sense.

But there is something I like about having a category for voices that are made 100% from internal units with no reference to “external” samples. Perhaps Synth Voices should be renamed to Internal Unit Only Voices, that’s a better expression of my intent. Though that’s not a particularly elegant name. Exclusively Internal Voices? I have may have set the bar a little too high with M.I.S.C., haha. I am open to suggestions.

So, following that logic I would vote to put it in Sample-based Voices.

Autogen301 deserves full credit as the catalyst of the acronym. My logic was that “Voices” are patches that are specifically designed for a user to sequence and modulate themselves so as to build their own compositions. Since I haven’t played with them yet (but am excited to do so!), I was going purely on the description which had references to self generating and deliberately minimal control and building blocks. They sounded like they were interactive compositions, like Krell patches on steroids that you could lightly poke to move in one direction or the other. But also tools to use to build your own patch. They didn’t sound like voices in the traditional sense (intended as a compliment), but the traditional usage of the term miscellaneous seemed to undervalue their inventiveness and uniqueness. I hated the potential of not referring to them as instruments. And that’s when the :bulb: :exploding_head:

Again, I defer to y’all.

Again, was having a similar train of thought. But the obvious missing category right now is “Effects”, which is purely because I haven’t gotten to one yet. I feel like sound generators are distinct from sound processors. And then once I started dividing things up it simply became fun to make more categories.

3 Likes

Such a cool community, seriously love the work you’re all doing :heart_eyes:
I’m in the middle of moving house right now but getting back into it soon-ish. Love the wiki!!

2 Likes

I almost started the unavoidable “Ultimate Synth Voice Discussion”

then i asked myself: what was that what we wanted to discuss there?

since there is already preset specific discussion on the threads that introduce instrument presets: i believe the great benefit of a more general instrument discussion would be to discuss, to learn from
and to share more general techniques… at least that was what i had in mind.

but wait! don’t we already have that kind of discussion?

now i believe @Joe had already a similar idea to what @Bparticle and i had in mind, when we were thinking
about a synth discussion thread:

initially i wanted to begin the “Ultimate Synth Voices Discussion” with some discussion
on “percussive Instruments”. now i feel Joe’s Garage (i did it again, i can’t help my self) of
Synthesis Techniques had already invited me to put it there…
(so we can turn Joe’s thread into a “Discussion about the Synthesis and Sound Design Techniques Discussion” which then will result in a corresponding comprehensive Wiki-Page “Synthesis and Sound Design Techniques with the ER-301” :joy: :sunglasses: )

1 Like

FYI, I’ve edited the SummaryForUserContributions template and fixed all of the current entries so that the name is no longer included inside the template. This was breaking the edit link (at the beginning of each entry) which before would bring you to the edit page for the template definition (not desired) rather than the entry itself (desired).

3 Likes