Polyphony: Snow vs TI?

[Spreader]

Thanks for the answers guys. They were more interesting than I had anticipated and made me ponder what constitutes a good unison in the first place.

So let's do some quick math. Let's say the longest note that is going to get played is 1 second long which nets us frequency resolution of 1hz. Our detune amount is 40 cents for that trance 2.0 supersaw.

The first obvious question is, how many saw waves do we want? For maximum tweakability there should one saw wave for each frequency bin. At 16khz that's around 400hz. So the answer is 400 saw waves.

But this becomes immediately problematic because at lower frequencies such as 100hz the 20 cents is only 10hz. So the tone is not going to be consistent there. Further problem is that in higher frequencies the harmonics will overlap when playing low notes, so they are not going to be consistent either.


Seems like this is in fact a really tricky, possibly unsolvable problem... Oh well. Just use your ears then.


My ears tell me that Supersaws where the saws overlap sound terrible, metallic and so on. In other words, when using massive amounts of saw waves to get those nice smooth highs, the most important thing in the implementation is very high frequency resolution. For example in the prior scenario the resolution needs to be 20/400 = 0.05 cents. No digital synth can possibly pull that off...

Does anyone know what the resolution of the virus TI is? 1 cent?

Anyway, the resolution problem maybe responsible for more terrible metallic sounding supersaws than can be calculated here. Or perhaps it's just the way that some synths tend to detune the saws on top of each other...