K5synth

I've owned my K5 for years and years now, and I'm still discovering 
new things. This is something I came up with while playing with the 
K5 this weekend.

Back in the mid/late 80s, Sequential had a synthesizer called the 
Prophet VS. It used something called vector synthesis. The idea is 
that you use a joystick to crossfade between four waveforms. The 
results are ran through your standard VCA, VCF, etc. The four 
waveforms are assigned to the four corners within the range of the 
joystick. Something like this (and here's crossing my fingers in 
hopes that this this ASCII art shows up correctly, please forgive me 
if it doesn't):

Wave3   Wave4
+---------+
|         |
|    O <--|-- Joystick
|         |
+---------+
Wave1   Wave2   

As you move the joystick towards each of the corners, the sound 
crossfades to the respective waveform. This allows you to create 
evolving sounds as you move the joystick from waveform to waveform. 

Ok, how does this apply to the K5?

You can set up a simple crossfade between two waveforms within a 
single patch by assigning the modulation wheel to control the 
amplitude of each of the sound sources. This is done on the Basic 
Edit Page. Check out 4.1 on page 15 in the manual. Set the WHEEL to 
modulate the DHG for both S1 and S2. In order to crossfade between 
the two waveforms, the modulation should be set to effect the sound 
sources in an opposite fashion. So you set the W DEP to -31 for S1 
and +31 for S2. Also, be sure you have each sound source set up to 
be modulated on DHG 1 page (section 4.4 in the manual).

This allows you to crossfade between the two waveforms within a 
patch. This in itself is pretty cool. For example, create a metalic 
bell like sound in one sound source and an ethereal choir in the 
other, crossfade between the two, and you get some interesting 
motion. 

But how about four waveforms like the Prophet VS? How can that be 
acheived with the K5?

For this, you will need a second patch. Set it up like the first 
patch described above with one addition: on the Basic Edit Page, set 
the P DEP to -31 for S1 and S2. Make sure that the first patch is 
just the opposite: set P DEP to +31 for S1 and S2. What this does is 
allow you to control the patch's volume via the control peddle. 
Since the two patches will be modulated in an opposition fashion, as 
one is fading out, the other fades in, but I'm getting ahead of 
myself.

The next step is to create a Mult-Patch with the two patches. Make 
sure each patch has voices assigned to them, uses the MIDI channel 
you want, and are assigned to which ever output(s) you want to use.

Now, as you play a chord and press the control peddle in and out, 
you will be crossfading between the two patches. And as you use the 
modulation wheel, you will be crossfading between the two waveforms 
within each patch. In conjuction, these two operations will allow 
you to crossfade between each of the four waveforms making up the 
two patches.

Whew! Hope you're still with me. :-)

I've been playing around with this with some cool results. It's 
really neat to hear the sound evolve over time and control it in 
realtime. Fortunately, I have a DarkStar synth, which has a 
joystick. I was able to reassign the joystick's MIDI control 
messages via my sequencer to modulate the K5. So I'm able to come 
pretty close to what the Prophet VS was capable of. But even without 
the joystick, the modulation wheel with a control peddle will give 
you the same results.

Hopefully, I can put some .mp3 files demonstrating this technique, 
if the files are small enough.

Let me know if any of this has made sense! Any questions or comments 
are welcomed. Thanks. :-)