Doepfer

@james: some nice ideas, though i don't see much advantage in having a quad vca when two dual vca's will do just the same and be just as small. the normalizing to all inputs is a good idea. or at least designing the circuit board to allow this as a simple modification - i am constantly frustrated by sockets that are double soldered onto the board, making normalization impossible.

@nick: with respect, my intention in assembling a polyphonic modular synth is not to reproduce the architecture/sounds of any polysynth that already exists, but quite the opposite. the mono sounds i use on stage cannot be produced by an ms20, minimoog or any other monosynth, and this is what i would like to adapt to polyphony. slightly different version of a sound for each voice is only the beginning. am/ring modulation and fm between different voices produces a lively changing spectrum even from a repeated major chord (i've tried all this struggling with multiple keyboards/a190's)

the main disadvantage of a modular poly setup seems to be the amount of twiddling that needs to be done to change a voice to something specific, "i'm feeling lucky" twiddling not withstanding. i have found two a155 sequencers quite convenient as an 8 preset bank, using the gate outs to apply routing changes and the cv outs to set values of critical bits. but this is an expensive and rack-consuming experiment not really worth lugging onstage.

polyphonic modulars are de facto non-existant in the "mainstream" of electronic music. dieter's unbeatable price/quality relationship makes it a safe bet that when polys do finally make their presence felt, we'll be seeing the doepfer name all over them.

and mine too, if nobody else does those quad modules :)

stu

> What about a manual cv source multed to all the parameters you want to
> change?

Yes, that works... in the circumstances where you have CV on a  
parameter... though you'll often find a lot of parameters,  
**especially** on the more compact and budget conscious modules one  
is likely to think about when trying to build up sets of matched  
modular voices.

Looking at the history of polyphonic synths you can see that the  
advent of synth chips like SSM and CEM to a substantial degree  
enabled polysynths because they had CV on nearly all their parameters  
and they allowed smaller and (hopefully) matched systems with  
multiple voices. Unfortunately imho the demand for an affordable  
simple patchable analog synth winds up conflicting with the CV on  
every parameter which in my mind is a necessary feature for a  
satisfying attempt at making a poly modular.

> Don't forget a Quad VCA too.

A-132-2? or the forthcoming A-132-4?

There are certainly some uses for the A-132-2 but it's not going to  
deliver 4 independent VCAs. At first it looked really neat to me and  
then I realized except for the CV input  pots, a pair of dual VCAs is  
in most cases more flexible in the same space because you can get the  
same effect by multing the source voltage to.

Nick