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Originally Posted by Yoozer  How are you going to handle polyphonic duties, or are you doing those with a Rhodes or clavi (which are not synths proper but electromechanical units)?
But it's going to take more time and impossible to implement live unless you relegate all the other parts to tape/harddisk.
As for the P5, the unit by itself has been used for entire soundtracks - just multitrack everything.
Whatever you choose should cover anything that's currently missing from the P5 - either in sonic character or in features. |
I actually don't do too much polyphonic/chordal stuff. I like monophonic playing, mono bass guitar or moog bass, melody on moog or clavinet or wurly. I also a have an ARP string ensemble, but to get it's full effect it has to be used sparingly, and mostly monophonic IMO. I like playing chords on it, but to me it's the same as if I was playing something like the jupiter 80 or some other digital or even analog poly: it's fun to play yourself, but it's so overused and automatically turns your music into pad-based electronica, which I don't really like. In other words, it sounds cool, but it's very easy to overdo. Now, the only real polyphonic playing I do is on the clav and wurly, but usually with just one hand, and maybe 2-3 notes at a time. My musical training is more Indian classical, which is monophonic and monotonal (is this the right term?), than western, so I don't really have a need for a full polysynth.
Plus I have always thought polysynths to sound dated to me, since most poly sounds are limited in their scope and sound very similar, because you really can't apply multitimbral modulation to more than a couple voices without utter chaotic mess ensuing. You can say analog monos like the minimoog sound dated as well, but you can do so much more with the sound to make it fresh than a poly in my opinion. Bob Moog never designed a poly, his reasoning being that each voice's signal path is much simpler (in theory) so performing complex musical gestures with multiple voices is much more difficult and impractical than just one voice. Plus it is difficult to detune multiple oscillator in multiple voices, since most western theory would not really make sense when you have a chord with stacked notes on each voice, and western theory is really the basis for a polysynth.
Bob's perspective was that the keyboard was just one way to control pitch, and the keyboard can and should control more than just pitch.