Syntorial Lesson Help (Confused About Advantage Of Unison)
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Hi,
I'm currently on Chapter 14, with the lesson on "Unison and multiple oscillators"
There are a few things I don't get in this video.
Joe doubled and transposed the first osc and then applied unison. If I understand correctly, he said this is a way to get the heightening effect of two octaves while maintaining the pulsating effect.
Couldn't you just transpose the second osc and then detune each osc manually to get the same effect?
Secondly, he later said in the same video that unison detuning allows us to add the pulsating effect to any osc combination that we want without being limited to doubling and detuning one waveform.
Can't you just use two different OSC waveforms and detune them?
Thanks 😀
Ben Sanders
5 years ago
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Ben Sanders wrote:
Why isn’t unison with two voices detuned exactly the same as two oscs enabled and detuned regardless of transposing?
Without transposition, you're right, they would be the same, except with Unison you can use Spread to spread them out into the stereo field. For real-life practical purposes, if you want two oscillators detuned at the same octave with no spread, you can do this with either method.
0 5 years ago Reply
Hi Joe, thanks for your reply.
I guess the "why" doesn't matter so much in this topic but I still don't get why there is a difference.
Why isn't unison with two voices detuned exactly the same as two oscs enabled and detuned regardless of transposing?
Thanks.
0 5 years ago Reply
Hi Ben
Ben Sanders wrote: Couldn’t you just transpose the second osc and then detune each osc manually to get the same effect?
Not really. The pulsating and smearing effect of detuning really only works when the two osc are at the same octave. If they're 12 semi apart, yes you can still get a subtle pulsation, but not as washy as it would be at the same octave. And if the semi separation is higher than 12 semi, there's practically no pulsation/smearing with detuning.
Whereas Unison doubles (or quadruples) each oscillator and detunes the duplicated oscillators, so it doesn't matter where the semi is set, since they each get that nice same-octave smearing and pulsation.
Ben Sanders wrote: Can’t you just use two different OSC waveforms and detune them?
Same as above. Once 2+ oscillators are no longer at the same octave, manually detuning them won't create much of a pulsation/smearing effect. So Unison double/quadruples each of the oscillators regardless of what their Semi is set to.
0 5 years ago Reply