I think the FantomG's ARX expansion brass board has the ability to do a 'divisi' of parts. What this means for those that don't know, is that voices (often different voices) can be stacked up on one note, but if you play two or three notes, they 'split out' rather than the second note ALSO having two or three sounds on it.
Think of it like a trombone, an alto and a trumpet playing unison. Then they play a chord. Six other players don't join them! Each of them takes ONE note in the chord.
It used to be a feature on many of the old school analog synths, at least with the same sound, and with Oberheim and some other with different sounds, and is also in many of the newer VSTi synths too.What do you think?
I will give my take on it.
One of the earliest Oberheim analog synths, the
Oberheim 4-Voice, was essentially four
monophonic synths slung in a case and wired up together...without lingering on this drastic oversimplification, what you were presented with was a number of SEM's, or Synthesizer Expander Modules, each one a self-contained monophonic synth.
Each of the four notes then played on the keyboard, harnessed one SEM apiece. (there were also 2-Voice and 8-Voice versions).
In order to give a homogeneous polyphonic sound, the SEM's had to be
individually programed to the same sound, and this combination was stored in a programmer that had 16 locations.
If you had different sounds in each SEM, you could assign the instrument to move sequentially through the SEM's in turn, or remain "frozen" on one, or remain on one for the first note played, and then step through the other three....you could also split the keyboard.
Depending on what you were looking for, the tuning discrepancies of early analog could either be a boon or a bust, and I remember the sound was very spacious, especially so since each SEM could be placed in it's own position in the stereo field.
I'm not sure if the type of keyboard scanning was involved in how each was accessed sequentially, but I do remember the one a friend of mine had (a 4-Voice) where the first note played activated SEM-1, and subsequent notes sounded SEM-2, 3, and 4 in that order...at least that's how I remember the way the voices (or SEM's) were allocated.
In that way, with different sounds programmed on each SEM, you could stack or diversify sounds depending on how you played, as in how you suggested
..."trombone, an alto and a trumpet playing unison. Then they play a chord. Six other players don't join them! Each of them takes ONE note in the chord." There is a VST that replicates the Oberheim synth's "diversi" here in the OP-X PRO-II version :
http://www.sonicprojects.ch/obx/comparisontable.html I am not aware of any present day hardware arrangers/workstations that do this, but maybe there is.
One thing for sure...it would be a very cool idea to implement.
Ian
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