![]() Another reason you pick this value is so you can hear both voices clearly. If you just want a little bit of swirl then choose 2 voice unison. This is how many total voices the synth will produce. To the right of that you can see a drop down box. If you turn on this button then you immediately get unison. It’s very obvious on this synth but not all synths are like this. The first setting you need to notice is the on/off button. You’ll find all of your unison settings in bottom middle. This is the perfect virtual instrument to use if you’re just starting out. We’re using Syntorial’s Primerfirst because it’s so basic. Then I’ll babble about my own unique perspectives. Secondly I’ll show you some details in Native Instruments’ Massive VST. First I’ll walk you through how do do it in Primer. Let’s talk about how to physically perform this technique. In non-Primer parlance that means the oscillators are not retriggered via gate. Specifically, these sounds are unison but with the ‘start button’ turned off. Some songs that use this technique are “Flashing Lights” by Kanye West and also “SexyBack” by Justin Timberlake. Just like with wideness, this can be done from inside your synth using this function. You just will be hard pressed to get more punch any other way. If Yngwie Malmsteen played synths, he’d love unison since he thinks “more is more”.Īnother awesome side effect of using unison is the attack portion of a sound. Whereas with doubling and transposing or doubling and detuning oscillators you get one voice, unison gives you more. Unison is also great for creating super huge sounds. You can do it right from your sound design. Once you master this technique you might not have to achieve wideness at the mixing stage. Unison is like a cheat code for wide sounds. It becomes confusing with unison since it happens endogenously, or from within. That’s how the synth understands it so you should think like that too. If you’re Mariah Carey then you probably are very familiar with ‘whistle register’ as well.įor now, just think of your entire synth, when not using unison, as one voice. Most vocal instructors will speak about ‘head voice’ and ‘chest voice’. Oscillators, in our choral example relate to the various resonators that a human has in their body. Even so, oscillators play a special role here. In fact, when using unison, the entire signal path of the synth is duplicated and modified. The one thing I want to clear up before we get started is how oscillators work in this metaphor. I’ll also show you how to use unison in Syntorial’s Primer VST as well as Native Instruments’ Massive. Later in this article I’ll use a choir metaphor to elucidate how synth unison relates to people unison. For all intents and purposes, they sang the exact same note. Sure, they probably sang different notes but we have no record of it. After we got sick of banging on logs, we sang just one note at a time. Back in the history of human music, there was no polyphony. Think of it like this: polyphony means different notes. Unfortunately I think that I described it slightly wrong in the video. In the last Easy Synth Programming installment I talked about polyphony. Luckily, I think I’ve already cracked this nut. Trying to understand how all these concepts work together can be tricky. Some synths let you set max voices and some don’t. Unison, polyphony, and legato are all related parameters. Come with me on a journey, along with Syntorial, to make thick, wide, and full synthesizer sounds with unison. However, if all your sounds are needles in your haystack of a mix then no one will listen. My girlfriend doesn’t like how that sounds and neither do your listeners.
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