Curious question, since today's technology for polyphonic guitar synths would likely allow for a polyphonic octave pedal with a flip-flop style of tone. Another option is to create such a patch with a guitar synth, but I wonder if the flip-flop waveform generated by a bass guitar signal will be exactly a pulse wave?
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Is there a polyphonic octaver that sounds like analogue?
- Thread starter Iristone
- Start date
It seems that the Boss OC-2 and maybe Mu-Tron will not directly output a square wave. Instead they use the square wave to modulate the original signal, creating an octave-down signal that retains some of the original waveform. No wonder why they sound so characteristically good, and it seems I cannot emulate it with a guitar synth at all.
What exactly are you trying to do with the octave? Just octave down? That would be easier than octave up in my experience.
Have you tried the OC-5 in polyphonic mode? The monophonic mode sounds very close to the original OC-2, so much so that you could only tell them apart in a clinical setting, solo'd (which means, virtually indiscernible in real world applications involving other musicians).
Have you tried the OC-5 in polyphonic mode? The monophonic mode sounds very close to the original OC-2, so much so that you could only tell them apart in a clinical setting, solo'd (which means, virtually indiscernible in real world applications involving other musicians).
Basically I'm looking for a solid, fat, slightly analogue-synthy (but not totally Seppuku) octave down with minimal digital artefacts such as latency and chorus-like inharmonicity. I can play my 8-string for octave up.
To my understanding, the "poly" mode of the OC-5 doesn't emulate the OC-2 tone. I'd prefer a pedal that sounds analogue-synthy with polyphonic tracking in ONE mode, not two.
I think the OC-5 poly mode sounds pretty similar to the OC-2 tone. What's the use case for needing it to be polyphonic and octave down though? Low octave square wave synth tones don't really work well playing notes close together.
Thanks! I'll check it out.
90% for better tracking especially during fast runs;
9% as a tonal fattener, I may blend it in ever so slightly to boost the even harmonics (odd harmonics for the octave note);
1% to simulate a paraphonic synth before I could get a 12 Step and it ships to China (we used to have a Keith McMillen dealer but they don't carry Muse Kinetics anymore).
In my experience polyphonic pitch shifters tend to sound a bit more 'accurate' to what an instrument sounds like than analog octave pedals, which are very synthy in timbre. Part of that is likely that tracking on analog octavers is done with logic level signals which don't have any dynamic range on purpose. The OC-5 poly mode has that synthy quality that something like a Whammy or Digitech Drop doesn't have.
I haven't personally tried an OC-5, but it seems like the obvious answer to this query as I think it is the only poly octaver that even attempts to emulate an analog octaver rather than either doing the organ sound thing with phase vocoding (Ala many of the EHX pitch shifters) or trying to sound more "natural" using more complex algorithms. This demo compares the Poly and Mono modes of an OC-5 a few times, one with a P-bass around 1:00. It definitely sounds pretty "analog" to me:
