Post-Mix Levels And Pre-Mix Levels; Preventing Clipping On The Filters - Alesis Andromeda A6 Tips And Tricks Manual

house! Just setup a single VCO at level 20 and its Sub-Oscillator at 19 and you've got the classic
Juno/Sh-101/Mc-202 bass sound! Add some white noise at 0.1 to add some analog noise :)
Turn off the mod to the VCA, and well its not quite the same is it? ^_^ Only thing is, if you sweet the
cutoff by hand then the effect is somewhat lost. If you mod the Filters from the ribbon, assign the
same modulation to the VCA sustain level to keep the effect going. Also add about 50% filter
feedback for a wetter filter squelch :)
Oh yeah if you set the sustain to 100% then you get a super snappy attack even though everything
is maxed - weird

12.6 post-mix levels and pre-mix levels:

Any synthesizer in which you can set pre-mix levels and post-mix levels is bound to have
some interesting effects over fixed level synthesizers.
For a " warmer" effect similar to Roland equipment, the recommended level is lower. We' re
talking combined levels here btw for the rest of the document.
Post-mix: around 20 for post-mix seems to have no harmonic distortion, which is where you
want to be to get the best emulation for low-volume Rolands.  50 is very mellow and clean.
80 is great and dynamic, with more balls – best for Minimoogs I feel. 100 is very squished
and distorted sounding.
For pre-mix, Around 50 is mellow and warm (also good for Roland), around 60 is balls-ier
(best for Minimoog emulations). 70 and over seems to have more of that Memorymoog
Curtis feeling to it.
VCA Envelope Level setting: Apparantly there is a " less squished" tone at around 75,
according to Colin' s findings. More dynamic. The squashed sound, however, can be useful
for certain tones. It' s another consideration to add to your pallete. 
Colin explains his version of things:
The reason why I'm stressing this is because a lot of people I know who have heard the presets
comment on the synth sounding "dry and harsh", VA like .
Guess what happens when you overdrive transitor type mixers, you get unpleasant odd harmonic
distortion :) When I back down the VCO pre-filter volumes by half on most of the presets, a sweeter
sound emerges - ie the high order odd harmonics have dropped in level :)
Up to about 30 for each VCO sounds about the most overdrive I'd wanna use - you can notice it on
dual sinewave patches - with the VCOs at 30 each, you can hear harmonic distortion in the
sinewaves. This sounds good on saw waves however, but go too high and your VCO monster
actually starts to sound like a VA....
Likewise with the Post-filter mixer, 60 sounds just right with the right amount of overdrive for normal
use. Go higher for a certain effect but I wouldn't do it on every patch.

12.7 preventing clipping on the filters:

(how not to act like a memorymoog)
The Andromeda overdrives on the filters rather easily. This is good – it allows you to get that
aggressive Memorymoog type sound. However, sometimes you prefer a smoother sound.
The following are some collected tips on getting a smoother sound out of the Andromeda.
From Colin:
A resonance level of about 62, levels the filter slope off nicely. anything higher starts to boost and
anything lower smooths the slope out.
A lso it would seem, that to prevent clipping , at high resonance. You wpould need to reduce the
VCOs to below 15 on the Pre-filter mixer to allow room for the resoannt peak, or else you get that
overdrive effect.