SY-300 - Cleaner Polyphony by Splitting the Pitch Ranges on the SY-300

Started by Rhcole, February 01, 2017, 01:58:53 PM

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Rhcole

I became intrigued with the possibilities of cleaner chords and intervals in the SY-300 by setting individual oscillators to separate pitch ranges. The idea is that there would be less crosstalk between oscillators reducing the digital hash and beat frequencies the SY produces when playing chords with 7ths, 9ths, etc.

It got me intrigued, so a short lunch and I conducted a few experiments. Here is the low-down on this approach:

1. The SY oscillators are easily rich enough sounding on their own to sound great covering their own ranges without support from the other oscillators.
2. Setting different pitch ranges does absolutely improve the polyphonic chords and intervals on the SY-300. Definitely.
3. BUT, it isn't as perfect as you might expect because, the SY-300 pitch conversion process ITSELF is imperfect. In other words, play a note in Oscillator One and a 7th in Oscillator Two and you still get some mush, because it ISN'T A HEX SYSTEM.
Oh yeah, that's right.

But guess what, this is truly useful because it's BETTER. Better pitch shifts, better 12 string fakes, better Shimmer Reverbs (you can roll your own with this within the SY).
Lot's of great stuff. I can think of 10 or 20 patches that would give new life to this box without breaking a sweat.

I really do like the SY-300. It has always been underestimated because you have to squint at it and use your head to realize what it can do. It's no plug and play doo-dad.

Brak(E)man

Thanx for the info
These findings are very interesting.
So in your view the big issue is the pitch detection
swimming with a hole in my body

I play Country music too, I'm just not sure which country it's from...

"The only thing worse than a guitar is a guitarist!"
- Lydia Lunch

JiveTurkey

You're gonna need to post these patches as proof  ;D

What an wonderfully timed thread. I was looking for some modulated verb/shimmer/ambient delay stuff to add to my Atomic. I know the SY can do it but I have it on "imitate a casio keyboard" duty and haven't really messed much with using it as multifx.

chrish

Quote

''I really do like the SY-300. It has always been underestimated because you have to squint at it and use your head to realize what it can do. It's no plug and play doo-dad.''
Is there some app out there that will make it plug and play. I'm not comfortable  using my brain. ;-)

Rhcole

So here's the deal on this box. Roland designed it for hot-shot lead playing, a guy taking a wailing synth solo with an aggressive tone in hard-core high-energy music. That's what it is best at and where Roland targeted it. No special pickup required and it tracks as fast as you can play. Compare it competitively with these: https://pigtronix.com/products/mothership/
http://www.redwitchpedals.com/synthotron

It tracks better than these products and offers limited polyphony. That's the product pitch right there.

When you want it to go beyond these design specs, you have to work at it. Roland designs many of their best products with hidden capabilities that even they don't know about. They toss their stuff into the market and say "You figure it out".

When you want decent polyphony out of this box, you have to bend to its design limitations or work around them. Using the pitch split I described above, play "nice" intervals such as a major bar chord and it is perfect. Anything not too dissonant sounds really good.

But if your harmonic tastes veer into complex chords, dissonant intervals, etc.  it doesn't track very well no matter what you do. You can minimize the audio effect with various tricks but the SY-300 JUST CAN'T TRACK THEM.

I personally love complex chords- I could have been a jazz player or an acoustic guy with a bunch of capos but I'm just too STRANGE for that. So, I force my tools to obey me. With the SY I have multiple tricks to blend, hide, disguise pitch flaws so that it sounds pretty good.

But I'm clear that Roland didn't intend this box for me and that it's up to me to make it work.




Brak(E)man

I agree on all but two things.

I don't think it's up to me to make the polyphony work
the advertisements clearly stated its polyphonic.
But.... Also
It can't handle chords that normally are considered non dissonant
Like sus 4,  sus 2 , 11 etc.

swimming with a hole in my body

I play Country music too, I'm just not sure which country it's from...

"The only thing worse than a guitar is a guitarist!"
- Lydia Lunch

Rhcole

http://www.electroharmonix.com/products/hog2

"The award winning HOG (Harmonic Octave Generator) earned kudos from players and reviewers alike for its ability to exponentially expand a musician's sound palette. Now EHX take the HOG to an even greater level of performance and functionality with the HOG2. It delivers complete control of ten totally polyphonic and glitch free voices ranging from two octaves below to four above the instrument's pitch all without the need for a special pickup or instrument mods of any kind."

Polyphonic and glitch-free my a**. I sold it because it gargled like it was using mouthwash for anything more than root-fifth-octave. The SY is 10 times more usable, IMO.

This is the state of promotion for these kinds of products. I'm not saying that it's right, but this is what companies represent.
I'm not picking on EHX either, go look at Eventide's promotions or other companies.

NOBODY HAS CLEAN PITCH-SHIFTING THROUGH A 1/4" CABLE TODAY, at least not for complex chords. I have tried them all.

Elantric

QuoteNOBODY HAS CLEAN PITCH-SHIFTING THROUGH A 1/4" CABLE TODAY,



But There are numerous products that accomplish DSP drop tuning /Capo with reasonable success from a 1/4" INPUT

Digitech Whammy DT

EHX Pitchfork

Rhcole

Downshifts tend to work better than higher shifts. Take the products and shift them up two octaves, play a few 7ths and...  :o

Brak(E)man

swimming with a hole in my body

I play Country music too, I'm just not sure which country it's from...

"The only thing worse than a guitar is a guitarist!"
- Lydia Lunch

Elantric

QuoteIsn't the problem the pitch recognition to start with ?

The problem is thinking 13 pin guitars with GK hex pickups feeding GK processors (VG/GR/GP) are dead , and SY-300 could replace all of them

pasha811

In the past with Max 4 Live I have tried to use the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform functions there to play chords and isolate single notes. No way. Too hard for me. I agree it's all down to pitch detection. The Zero crossing approach of GR300 was pure genius but it came from a divided pickup. SY-300 suffers from a major flaw it does not take a GK divided pickup as input. SY-300 it's monophonic. I gave it a try recently. Some halo chords.. some very good synth lead sound but the 'dream' of every guitarist is to strum or pick and get pads and other synth sounds. Good to know that 'easy' chords can be supported with some tricks and programming! However maybe a GK input was not possible after all for the overwhelming complexity of processing 6 inputs at once.
Listen to my music at :  http://alonetone.com/pasha/

Brak(E)man

Quote from: Elantric on February 02, 2017, 12:37:42 PM
The problem is thinking 13 pin guitars with GK hex pickups feeding GK processors (VG/GR/GP) are dead

I don't , I'm keeping all mine and are hoping for new products.
The dissapointment are the polyphony and mushiness with the SY
(and the claim that 1/4" works instead of hex )
Which in in other aspects are the best guitar synth so far IMHO
swimming with a hole in my body

I play Country music too, I'm just not sure which country it's from...

"The only thing worse than a guitar is a guitarist!"
- Lydia Lunch

JiveTurkey


Brak(E)man

swimming with a hole in my body

I play Country music too, I'm just not sure which country it's from...

"The only thing worse than a guitar is a guitarist!"
- Lydia Lunch

Rhcole

Go get 'em, J.T.  8)

I do have a new patch I made yesterday with the pitch split, and it is cleaner. I'll post it over the next couple'a days.

chrish

I've seen some video from members posted here and those guys are jazz lead shreaders and make the sy300 sound very good, even using factory patches.

So yea, they did find the target musician. And remember it was the prog rock and jazz guys that were using the early roland guitar synth tech, which is how many of us were exposed to this tech.

Are there any pro metal sheders using any synths at all, besides the roland demo guys?

JiveTurkey

Quote from: Brak(E)man on February 02, 2017, 02:06:11 PM
Agreed , lead the way
Hey man I posted my presets (aka stuff from others where I tweaked a few settings and called it good  :-X ;D)

Also; I didn't start all this "angry at the SY talk"  :'( ;D

@Rhcole; I'll give it go when you have a chance to post it up! Brak(E)man would probably be the better beta tester as he has had issues with more complex chords than myself. Pitch shifting bar(re) chords for my weekend warrior cover band purposes probably isn't going to be much of a stress test  ;)

chrish

Quote
''Also; I didn't start all this "angry at the SY talk"  :'( ;D''

:-) some of us aren't 1/4'' sheep. ;-)

Rhcole

Hey, I'm more than capable of creating dissonance to play through a patch by myself! In fact, I have to work NOT to sound like that!  ;)
The patch I have is a good example of a pretty clean patch for all kinds of chordal work. I'll see if I can post later today.
It's nothing revolutionary, you've heard these SY tones before but it really is about as clean sounding as you can get from the SY.

... I don't think we'd have near the negative attitudes to the SY if Roland had positioned it differently. I would go with calling it a highly configurable multi-FX box with synth-like capabilities.
OR, and somebody here would likely recall this term better than me, there is a term for quasi-polyphonic products... I don't remember what it is. 
OR, Roland could have called it a lead synth and left it at that.
I think people feel a bit ripped-off because Roland represents it as polyphonic in the same way EHX, Eventide, DigiTech and others do for their glitchy pitch-shifters. The difference is that those of us with Hex products can be misled due to the clean processing of Roland's other devices, whereas when EHX claims that the C-9 is polyphonic you KNOW that it barfs on 9th chords no matter what they say.

chrish

Metheny said that the sound of the gr-300 could open a beer can. I agree, when he plays straight guitar it is a wonder.

i also think that we talk about that poly issue in the hopes to roland is reading this stuff and will correct their software and restore their dignity as a company.

krysh

to me this brings up the question, why there never has been a real update for the sy-intern software except bug fixes in the firmware up to version 1.0.3.?
my 2 ct's, yours,

krysh

sy-300 newbie and bass- and guitarplayer from hamburg, germany

Elantric

Quoteto me this brings up the question, why there never has been a real update for the sy-intern software except bug fixes in the firmware up to version 1.0.3.?


Because that's Roland /Boss corp's standard operating procedure, they rarely add new features to their products. They focus on creating new products. The same small R & D engineering team that created SY-300, must focus on new products like Boss Katana 

chrish

Quote from: Elantric on February 04, 2017, 07:11:13 AM

Because that's Roland /Boss corp's standard operating procedure, they rarely add new features to their products. They focus on creating new products. The same small R & D engineering team that created SY-300, must focus on new products like Boss Katana
Contrast that business model to a company such as Moog.

The moog voyager was marketed, i believe, in 2003. Moog has continually updated the software to fix bugs and add features to both the keyboard and the later rack mount version.

Moog even had a run of product that was discovered to have bad processer chips, and they made it right with their customers, even with out of warrenty product.

Then they recently added the flagship voyager keyboard complete cv in and outs. Add to that all the midi control and it truely is a monster synth.


Brak(E)man

Improving the pitch recognition wouldn't be adding new features , but correcting a faulty feature and would add to their credibility/reputation.

swimming with a hole in my body

I play Country music too, I'm just not sure which country it's from...

"The only thing worse than a guitar is a guitarist!"
- Lydia Lunch