Harmonizer Block; Envelope Generator Block - Panda-Audio Future Impact I User Manual

Harmonizer Block

The Harmonizer Block consists of the harmonizer with three transposed voices,
and the Distortion. The input to the Distortion is a mixture of four voices, the
original bass and the three harmonized voices.
MIXER BASS/VOICE1/VOICE2/VOICE3 (0..127): You can set an arbitrary pro-
portion between these four sound sources. VOICE1 is fixed at +1 octave
TH TH
transposition, the other two are variable in steps of 5 , octave, octave+5 ,
two octaves.
HARMONIZER TRANSPOSE VOICE2/VOICE3 (0..3): For two voices the trans-
position is variable. Identical settings of the two voices are scaled so, that they
are not exactly equal, they will have a slight beating between them.
DISTORTION GRADE (0..31): The degree of distortion can be adjusted here.
Even at zero the distortion is not turned off.
DISTORTION TONE (0..127): The tone of the harmonizer/distortion part can be
set here. The filter is an equalizer set to 2100 Hz and Q=0.8. The controller can
adjust a cut or boost at this frequency. 0-> -11dB; 64-> 0dB; 127->+11dB.

Envelope Generator Block

VCA ATTACK/RELEASE, VCF ATTACK/DECAY, NOISE ATTACK/DECAY (1..127):
FI has three envelope generators that control the Voltage Controlled Amplifier
(VCA), the Voltage Controlled Filter (VCF) and the Noise Generator. All three of
them are triggered with every picking of the bass, but there is an important
difference between them: the envelope generator of the VCA is an Attack-
Release envelope, while the other two are Attack-Decay envelopes. This
means, the VCA envelope will start with an attack from zero, and when it
reaches the maximum level this will be kept until the end of the sound; then it
will fade out with a release time.
The other two envelopes will start from zero with an attack, and when they
reach the maximum they immediately turn back and decay to zero. As a
further twist, the VCA envelope works this way as described here only when it
is driven from a keyboard or a computer; when it is driven from a bass, then
the sound decays either with the release time of the envelope, or with the
natural release of the bass sound as the sound is stopped, whichever is
shorter. This allows much more natural sounds from the bass guitar.
Please note that while the synthesizer sound is gated with the VCA envelope,
the noise source is not; therefore, if you play short notes and the NOISE DECAY
is long it can be sustained longer than the note itself.
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