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SeanLuke

> This undersells the CS-80. It had polyphonic aftertouch, which most synths don't have today.

Vangelis using poly aftertouch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoEkyBX7qsg

The CS-80 also famously had a touch strip, which Vangelis used to great effect in Blade Runner.

The strip in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV3qDUTVsNo&t=1487s

A famous example where it's used: https://youtu.be/smpTDkLCYb0?t=125

> A lot of synths can use polyphonic aftertouch but only a few new ones actually have poly-AT keyboards. The ones I know of are the Hydrasynth (out for a couple years now),

Interestingly the Hydrasynth is also one of the only modern synths with a touch strip. I think it's clear what the Hydrasynth was going for.

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Indeed, and I use my Hydrasynth Deluxe to drive Arturia CS-80 V4. It is the first reasonably authentic recreation, and it is a testament to the brilliant design of the CS-80 that it took this long for virtual analog recreations to reproduce it.

Previous attempts were pretty miserable, such as versions 1-3 from Arturia, and Memory Moon. At best they could be described as CS-80ish.

Poly aftertouch on the Hydrasynth is a revelation. I didn't think I would use it nearly as much as I do, and now I can't imagine being without it. I even play my Novation Summit from the HS.

Thank you to the people in this thread for bringing the Hydrasynth to my attention. I've been looking for a synth to get invested in and this one ticks every single box for me!

The brilliance of the Hydrasynth is not just the sound, but how well organized it is. It is a dream to program due to the signal path button matrix, and the OLED displays for the parameter knobs. Tap an OSC module, and all your params are there, nicely labeled. Same for an ENV, or Filter, or LFO. This saves tons of menu diving. There are shortcuts for quickly assigning modulations thanks to those module buttons, that again would otherwise require a lot of menu diving.

Oh, and the Deluxe adds release velocity, something the original didn't have.

Yeah it’s a great synth. Capable of some crazy sounds with all the LFOs, mod matrix slots and CV inputs. It’s fun to use an LFO in quantised pitch mode as a kind of arpeggiator

I recommend people check out the Linnstrument, it combines aftertouch with a touch strip with an additional y axis for each key. Made by Roger Linn of the LinnDrum fame. The only quirk is that it’s not a keyboard, but more of a guitar layout with each row tuned in fourths, which has its pros and cons.

I guess I’d say it feels like a cross between a guitar and a keyboard. I love mine; it’s my favorite electronic instrument.

Agreed, it feels like a good trade-off between those two instruments, something that fits right in between. I haven’t gotten used to doing chords on mine, but for melodies it is amazing, if you need MIDI. The keyboard can’t compare. Slap a Vangelis brass preset on it and you’re golden.

Roger came to our music hackspace in Shoreditch to show us how he made it. Inside was guess what.... a RPi. Loads of cool ergonomic/haptic ideas that make it very playable.

Not a Raspberry Pi but an Arduino Due, a much less powerful CPU with much less RAM and storage.

I think I misremembered it as a Pi Zero. But that's even more impressive!

Now I remember the conversation went on to "efficiency" and Roger definitely comes from the "optimise for glory" camp. Told a story about how the Linn Drum machine was really less that 8 bits and used some trickery to squeeze out quality at a time when cheap 8 bit DACs were not a thing.

Also the ROLI Seaboard, which is a traditional piano layout but with a squishy continuous silicone surface with raised “keys” which track x, y and z movement

Thanks for this and parent too! I didn't realise that this is precisely what I've been missing in my compositions: I never quite understood that poly aftertouch is actually rare!

Anyone know of weighted keys that implement this?

Gem S2/S3 - from the early 90s. And they haven't been made for a very long time.

Poly-AT is mechanically pretty hard to do so it's quite expensive. It wasn't considered a prime selling feature because not many people really wanted it.

The people who did want it were desperate for it, but it's taken until now for it to start appearing in mainstream products.

Still no modern weighted keys, unfortunately.

The only ones I know of are the Roland A-80 (somewhat rare) and Kurzweil MIDIBoard (very rare), both circa 1988.

The Gem S2 and S3 (as mentioned by TheOtherHobbes) from around 1992 - these do indeed have poly aftertouch, but neither of them are weighted.

Ensoniq was the company who most consistently used poly aftertouch in their keyboards during this era, but AFAIK only ever on the synth-weight keys. For their models that had weighted keyboards, they would use a keybed made by Fatar which only provided regular aftertouch, not poly.

Poly-AT was locked up by patents for years, much like FM.

Everyone worked around FM patents by creating "new" synthesis processes that were in effect FM.

Ah so this is why Phase Modulation seems more common?

No. Frequency Modulation is literally the first derivative of Phase Modulation: so for all intents and purposes they're the same thing. Nearly everyone uses PM -- especially Yamaha -- because it's rather easier to implement and doesn't present nasty challenges when doing self-modulation. Even Chowning's original paper on FM used PM. But everybody calls it FM because nobody ever heard of a PM Radio.

The GP is probably referring to the (false) urban legend that Phase Distortion, a technique developed by Casio, was meant to get around the FM patent. But PD has very little in common with FM (or PM) at all: the relationship largely begins and ends with the fact that they both operate on the phase of the sine wave. But PD is quite different, and its closest cousin is waveshaping. Indeed PD has its own patent.

Good to know, cheers! I may have mixed up PM and PD :)

I think it's a stretch to call it an urban legend. Casio was uninterested in licensing FM and developed a similar algorithm/approach. As far as I know Casio wasn't licensing FM throughout the 80s but still wanted to be competitive in the digital age.

This happened in the wake of the DX7, which was a massive success. Casio's CZ line never really touched it but they had some interesting qualities to them. I had the 101 which I bought for ~ $70 when nobody wanted them and they sell for a lot more now.

I disagree. It's true that Casio developed its own digital synthesis approach as it couldn't do FM. But this was true of Kawai (additive, hybrid single cycle, then PCM), Ensoniq (hybrid single cycle), Roland (single cycle + PCM), Korg (PCM), PPG (wavetables) etc. They all "worked around" the patent but none of these methods were anything like FM. PD in particular was designed to simulate low pass and resonant filters on traditional waves in a clever and cheap way. This really was a far cry from FM. It was inverse waveshaping with a window. It IS true that Casio eventually gave up and moved towards FM in later models (VZ).

I think we're saying the same thing. I wasn't suggesting any of these approaches offered some loophole that replicated FM, but that these manufacturers decided there's enough synthesis techniques that come close in sound that they opted to do so rather than pay Yamaha, as some other manufacturers did at the time.

Even if the underlying algorithms are nothing like FM if you get similar sounds (the gritty, busy waveforms) it made a lot of sense to market it and dilute the appeal of "FM" as THE digital synthesis method of the 1980s, as the DX7 nearly did.

I also wouldn't loop in wavetables with these approaches.

The concept of aftertouch made no sense to me, until I watched that Vangelis clip. Thanks.

I was picturing it in the context of a piano.

> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV3qDUTVsNo&t=1487s

I heard them touch the touch strip for the first time and the roots of the blade runner soundtrack just oozes out.

if polyphonic aftertouch interests you, then you may also want to look into MPE (midi polyphonic expression) iiuc.

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