PATCHED Ricardo Wave 7.1 Full
Nadia Grubb
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It all started some time in 1985. We were still working on the Prophet 2000 sampler, and as resident "historian" (in other words, I had the biggest archive of synth magazines and manuals), another engineer asked me to explain how various instruments performed waveform crossfades.
I had finished discussing the Fairlight, and had moved on to the PPG - explaining its wavetables, and the ability for it to scan a group of waves first in one direction and then back again. While I was scrawling this back and forth motion in my notebook to demonstrate, suddenly a little twinge went off in the back of my head, and my hand drew the next line arcing down the page...and the concept of crossfading between waves in two dimensions, not just one, was uncovered.
Trying to imagine what it would sound like to wander around a space with different waves in each corner was a little beyond most people's grasp at the time. So, I decided to patch it up at home on my rag-tag modular synthesizer.
For some reason, I was originally convinced that all four waveforms had to be at exactly the same frequency, with their only differences being their waveshape (and therefore, timbre). I plunged into my already heavily-modified Oberheim TVS 1-A (Two Voice Synthesizer - a pair of old SEM modulars, a sequencer, and a three octave keyboard in a road case) and found a way to sync all four oscillators. I then dialed up four different waveforms by playing with the waveshapes, sync tuning, and filters. Since the TVS has only two filters, to create more variations I used my hand-built linear-based PAiA modular for the other two, employing a Korg MS-02 exponential-to-linear control voltage converter to make sure they all tracked the Oberheim's keyboard together.
I then patched the four resulting waves into VCAs contained in a custom cabinet built by Gentle Electric, using the various control voltage mixers built into it. To help keep the correct correspondence between VCAs (i.e as one goes up, it's opposite goes down), I employed the inverters and bias offsets in a Dennis Electronics Control Voltage Processors to perform the crossfades. The timbre mix was animated by envelopes from a Sequential Model 700 programmer and an LFO patched in from the Oberheim. This was all mixed together and fed into a final VCA, which was also controlled from the Oberheim. In the end, one voice took up almost my entire collection of analog synths, spread across modules from six different manufacturers.
(I've read comments elsewhere to the effect of "oh, someone probably patched this up years ago on a Buchla or something and just didn't make a big deal out of it" - maybe; but it would have required a pretty large system. The trick is not just in mixing together four oscillators, but carefully controlling their blend so the sum always added up to 100% regardless of the modulation etc. Today, crossfading oscillators such as the Synthesis Technology "Morphing Terrarium" perform this crossfading, sometimes in 3 dimensions.)
It took about an hour to learn the patch - trying to mentally map a pair of ADSRs into imaginary two-dimensional space while my hands probed around a maze of wires...lets just say it took some thinking. Yet even on this limited system, some pretty interesting timbres started to emerge - struck attacks that faded into shimmering flutes; clarinets that opened up into raw sawtooths, etc. I took this tape into work and played it for a few engineers, and after ribbing me about my bad playing, they got excited.
At this time no back-of-the-building engineers were part of the product planning meetings at Sequential. But as luck would have it founder and pioneer Dave Smith was talking about starting work on Sequential's first digital synth, and trying to find a technology that would allow the waveshape to be changed in realtime. Just like people say, timing is everything.
As interest started to build, I started lobbying Sequential's marketing department to consider this new idea. I played them a tape of The Fixx (where the keyboardist plays a Prophet 5 and a PPG Wave), and boldly declared then that we could design one instrument that could make all of the sounds. (The whole issue of what exactly the VS would end up sounding like finally reached a head when the director of marketing demanded - well into the project - "Can it make the sound of a DX7 slap bass? If it can't do a good slap bass, I want out of the project right now." We just laughed at him and said "We don't know what it's going to sound like!!!" Thankfully, the VS didn't let us down.)
The team of primary engineers became myself, Josh Jeffe and Tony Dean (the latter two eventually moved on to E-mu Systems). Tony ended up being the main hardware engineer on the project, and Josh the main software engineer and project manager. We spent a lot of time trying to refine what I was calling "The Diamond Patch" (so-called for its brilliant, shimmering sounds...and other reasons I'll explain later), and figuring out how to design the hardware. Keep in mind that none of us had any background in DSP or psychoacoustics; we had to make it all up from scratch. As it turns out, some of our ignorance paid off in taking paths that textbooks would have told us to avoid - for better and for worse.
Without any background, Tony and I theorized how to do a wavetable synth, and came up with two strategies - either have a waveform of short, fixed length and vary how fast you played it back, or start with a very long version of a waveform and skip samples in it to alter how long it took you to read it out once (and therefore alter your final pitch). Unable to decide, we acquired a PPG Wave 2.3 and a Korg DW6000 to see how they pulled it off. We felt vindicated to learn that the PPG did it exactly the first way we theorized, and the Korg the second. (In the process, Josh became one of the few people in the US who knew how a PPG worked internally. The company didn't release schematics, advising would-be techs "Don't loose (sic) time - return to factory immediately!" if they had a problem). We liked the pure balls of the PPG better (plus the scheme that used shorter waveforms meant we could stuff more waves into the instrument), so we chose the transposition method.
This choice is the one place our ignorance paid off the most. Transposing a waveform way down in pitch causes strange upper harmonics - images of the original harmonic pattern - to appear if not "properly" filtered. These images are what gives the PPG (and VS) its brightness as well as vicious bass. I was raving for months (much to the bafflement of Josh and Tony) in particular about the sound a PPG makes where only the lowest and highest harmonics seem to be present. One day, as I walked into the lab while Josh was testing the VS hardware, I happily exclaimed "That's it! That's it!! That's the sound I mean! What's the waveform?" It turned out it was only a sine wave, but it was tuned so low that the image of its one fundamental harmonic was audible as a very high, airy harmonic.
Working on a sampler (the Prophet 2000) at the same time we were developing the VS really tuned our ears to the difference between natural sounds and synthesized ones. Most synths of the time went through some interesting gyrations with their envelopes, but then stopped any harmonic development when they hit their sustain stages. Also, real sounds have a lot of harmonic phasing and beating going on, which are too complex to recreate with just a simple LFO.
The first major change to the Diamond Patch was to allow the four waves to be separately tunable. Detuning provides a type of motion and beating that no amount of timbre variation seems to be able to replace. Josh tried all sorts of algorithms to simulate detuning in oscillators that were actually synched together, but got all sorts of weird artifacts for his troubles. In the end, it was best that we ended up with four independent oscillators per voice. (Speaking of sync, we considered that, but Tony didn't feel he could guarantee that it would work reliably in the custom chips. Oh well...)
Figuring out how to mix so many oscillators together and present them in analog to the rest of the voice chain ended up being one of the weak links in the VS's hardware design. I wanted to keep all 4 oscillators per voice in tune, to save on mixing issues: add the four waveforms digitally, shift two bits off to divide by 4, and feed down the normal analog chain. The new detuneable plan required the oscillators to run at different rates, so this simple digital add-and-divide scheme would not work.
The first idea for the VS oscillator mixing was a VCA per oscillator per voice, but that was too expensive. (Remember, you don't need just the chips, but support circuitry per chip as well - all of which gets multiplied 8 or more times by the time you reach the retail list price.) Next, we explored TI DSP chips or more 68000 CPUs to mix digitally, but that didn't work out either expense-wise: I remember we ran the clock cycle numbers, and felt it would take more than one DSP chip to do all the oscillators. Remember that chips were a LOT more expensive back then than they are now (slower, too); a Mac with a 8 MHz 68000 was a $2500 computer then (in mid-80s $$$), compared to now. It was hard to get TMS chips down to the low $20s each. And they needed all the support RAM, ROM, and chips. Plus no one in house had programmed a TMS chip before.
As I recall, Tony then thought he could fake VCAs with a bunch of sample and holds, varying the reference voltages to the holds, to get the mixing action. We talked Doug Curtis (yes, of Curtis filter fame) into making the S/H chips, while Tony did the digital oscillator clock chip. Alas, as I remember it, the oscillator chip came back with a bug, plus - without assigning blame - the analog S/H chips did not exactly sound pristine when married to our digital hardware design. Remember: our design required 32 oscillators, with a high enough clock master frequency to integer-divide down into several octaves of equal temperament tones at audio rate. Darn high for analog back then.
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