Programmable Mute

You can set up a sound having all four oscillators for a patch, but you do not have to use them all at once, and yet still have the whole available at any time to call upon any (or all) of its elements. This is an immediately useful application of the Parameter Sysex recording feature. Remember, you set that up on the MIDI page, setting it for RECOGNIZE & TRANSMIT. Now, set your BASIC midi channel to the one you will be using later to record your notes, and set up your sequencer to record from midi channel 1 to capture the sysex. Now we're ready to go.

Go to the patch-# you want to edit for this, and create a 4-oscillator patch, and select your initial sounds on the WAVES page for it. Now, go to the MACROS page, where you can edit parameters like pitch and filter and pan and the envelopes for each of the four waves A, B, C or D individually -- or for all four at once if you choose the ALL option. Start your recorder and enter the AMP window, which is where you will find the envelope settings for that wave. At the top of the window, following either the letter A, B, C, or D, depending upon which wave you are editing, or the word ALL if you are planning on affecting all four waves at once in a single stroke, you will see the word ON. If you cursor up to that and increment it, it will change to the word MUTED. When muted, either the wave you've selected or all four waves will be silenced, and their polyphony for that wave/oscillator will be freed up for use by other patches or simultaneously played notes. This, then, becomes equivalent to creating patches with one, two, (three!) or four oscillators!

If you had your sequencer rolling in record mode, you will have recorded a small sysex message when you changed from ON to MUTED, as you will again when you change it from MUTED to ON. This can be played back at any time (as well as cut/copied and pasted anywhere you like), using it to select waves as on or off within a patch for use at different times and places in a tune.

One important note, as I'd mentioned in other tips concerning parameter-sysex recording -- always be on a page other than the one you will be recording edits and changes on before you start recording. Then, when you move onto the page you want altered, that movement will be recorded by a sysex message telling the wavestation which page and which patch you will be affecting.

So, now a single patch can take on several personalities as you call upon different parts of it and mute other parts, bringing different envelope effects or filtrations, etc., into play as you feel like in a tune, and thinning-out the weight of a patch when that is what is being called for, without having to use up a patch-# position for each variation. So, effectively through combinations of the possibilities, you have fifteen possible separate patch-sounds for your Performances within just this one patch (sixteen if you count all-four-off as one of these).

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To which John Lehmkuhl added this important caveat:

> Terry Wrote in his mute oscillators via sysex tips:

>You can set up a sound having all four oscillators for a patch,

Keep in mind that each time you double the number of oscillators in a patch, that you half the amplitude of each waveform. This means that a 4 oscillator patch has 4 oscillators that are each playing at 25% of their available amplitude (on a WS keyboard or WS/AD move the joystick from center to each axis in a 4 osc. patch to hear the level for a particular waveform go back to 100%.)

So, another tip (and one we used for lots of the factory voicing so that all of the sounds were loud and proud) would be to reverse engineer a 4 oscillator patch into 4 separate patches assigned to the same performance. Do this carefully (make sure you assign the right waveform and copy the right parameters from each of the 4 oscillators) and then compare the single 4 osc. patch with the 4 single osc. patch version and you will notice an amazing amount of difference in the level that the Performance produces.

-John

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John Lehmkuhl
Real-Kuhl Productions
Sherman Oaks, CA
[email protected]
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"If you can hum it, I can program it"